An English Charm
My first time in England was in the depths of March, as a gormless eighteen-year-old, shepherded around by my high school teachers along with a handful of classmates. It was rainy, as expected; it was cloudy and grey, as expected. What surprised me was how cold it was - coming from Winnipeg, I anticipated that England would be a balmy relief, but that was not so. Instead, a damp chill settled into my bones every morning when I got out of bed, a chill that would not be unsettled or shaken for the rest of the day. Other than the cold, it was a fascinating trip. We were ostensibly meant to be on a sort of literary tour, visiting Bath for Jane Austen’s house (excellent, very enjoyable) Dickens World, a now-closed indoor theme park (bizarre, nightmare inducing) Stratford-on-Avon for Shakespeare (an excellent house museum and lovely garden, more souvenirs than you could possibly imagine) and Canterbury for Chaucer (very pretty town, prettier cathedral, marred slightly by the disgusting rotted skull of St. Thomas Beckett). We were often on an inter-city bus, a ‘coach’, chattering away as charming scenery, spattering rain, and strange snapshots of other people’s lives sped past the windows.
Those little insights into others' lives were perhaps my favourite part of the whole trip. Indeed, the many museums and historical sites and the ruins of churches were exciting, but when I think back on that trip, the memory that comes most to mind was pausing on the way out of the local parish church in Glastonbury and noticing a pamphlet pinned to the message board, announcing enthusiastically that the following week there would be a expert on reading animal auras, and to bring pets by 6 pm - sheep welcome! What I wouldn’t give to see a sheep having its aura deciphered.
There were funny shops with bizarre names (Happy Snaps, a film and camera store) and Boots (a pharmacy chain). The people in London moved at a breakneck pace with cold, flat faces, looking neither left nor right, in dark grey and black crowds that rushed up and down escalators and in and out of tube cars, carrying us along like flotsam on the tide. I can only imagine the stress of trying to herd a wily group of girls around London - our poor teachers. The city was exciting and seemed to pulse with life, but I admit I enjoyed the smaller towns more. The main streets of Bath and Canterbury were almost too charming, like something out of a picture book, and the half-timbered buildings of Stratford-on-Avon with their old-world thatched roofs and wide, leafy avenues were a delightful respite from concrete. We were sometimes turned loose for an hour for lunch during which my friend and I would walk up and down the cobblestone streets, enjoying cheap sandwiches and window-shopping, admiring buildings and pausing to read the blue plaques that signified historical importance, which seemed to be everywhere. I hadn’t travelled much at that point in my life, but I have since learned that my favourite way to experience a new place is to ramble - to rubberneck and feast my hungry eyes on everything around me. I like to wander around, a bit aimlessly, taking in the world at a reasonable pace, eager for little details, funny signs, or interesting window displays, ready to be charmed by a new place. I was certainly charmed by England then, and several times since, and I’m sure I’ll be charmed the next time I visit.
Jennifer
Smart as Paint
I live in an apartment which is, very evidently, several decades old. The age of my home is made apparent in lots of little details: the crooked floors, more creak than wood; the funny cupboard in the kitchen that would have housed an ironing board; and, perhaps most obvious, the rather shabby paint job. Like most rented apartments, it is painted white, but not consistently. The kitchen and my little office have had their doorframes and baseboards painted the same colour as the walls, but the hallway and bathroom and our strange little living room (originally a closet) feature badly stained wooden frames and baseboards along the floor, which have not been painted white, but do have evidence of the 'landlord’s special’ - a quick, sloppy paint job, with little flecks and globs of paint marring the wood. The wood is not high quality, by any means, but it is not improved by the drips and drops of white paint. Add to this the fact that the most recent coat of paint was actually baseboard paint, so it is glossy, which means that every wall in our apartment is vaguely shiny, highlighting every lump and bubble, every uneven surface, every mark. The result is not ideal.
I am of two minds about this situation, dear reader. Part of me thinks that this sort of paint job is just part and parcel of living in a rented space, and that there is little to be done. I am loath to move all our furniture, cover the whole place in painter’s tape and tarps, and spend weeks trying to improve the appearance of our wonky white walls. Slapping paint over the mess left by decades’ worth of sloppy contractors may not actually do very much to smarten up our shabby little home. Lipstick on a pig, sow’s ear, silk purse, and all that. Fresh paint will not change the uneven floors or the strange shape of the layout, or make the rooms different sizes. And it’s an awful lot of work.
On the other hand, we do have to live here, and the current paint makes my eyes twitch. It would be so lovely not to walk down my hallway and shudder a little at the horrible paint job, or avert my eyes from the bubble of paint over the bathroom cabinet. We might even choose a colour other than white for our rooms - perhaps not to our landlord’s taste, but certainly more pleasant and somewhat less clinical than the boring, lifeless shade which currently bedecks our walls. A pale sage, not too yellow, for my room, cream for the hallway, soft blue for the bathroom, perhaps, a muted blue-green for the bedroom - the very thought is charming. I have even gone so far as to purchase those little paint cards, the ones with the colours on them and their rather unusual names in the corners: Spring Valley, Linen, Reflecting Moment, New Day. None of these titles actually gives you much information about the colours themselves, but they are suggestive, evoking emotional reactions that seem quite separate from the actual shades and hues they represent. I think it would be a delight to work as the person who chooses the names for paint colours - how does one apply to such a post? Is there a guild, populated by the people who name crayon colours, ice cream flavours, and nail polish?
But I digress. Whether we decide to paint or not, the apartment will continue to feature a bizarre layout, ugly light fixtures, a floor full of creaks and pops, bulging walls, pitiful water pressure and a mostly-working bathtub tap. And yet, despite its many and varied flaws, I am fond of our little home - it is too full, and sometimes deeply frustrating, but it is ours - and for now, that is enough.
Jennifer
A Spoonful of Sugar
The holidays are fast approaching, the weather has turned distinctly chilly, some of us are contending with the slop, annoyance, and wonder of the first few snows of the year, which can only mean one thing: colds. Everybody gets them, sometimes one right after another, to the extent that your average classroom, office, subway car, busstop, and grocery store line is accompanied by a chorus of sniffles and coughing. Not pleasant music, all things considered. Some folks seem to get colds that are gentle, a slight irritation: they drink a little more tea, they go to bed a little earlier, they carry around a package of travel tissues, just in case. I am not one of these people. Colds hit me like a transport truck hitting a concrete wall. The worst ones leave me in bed for days, guzzling hot liquids and longing for the days when I could breathe properly through my nose. My head goes heavy and fuzzy; my throat is dry and sore; my sinuses are stuffed and swollen; I am exhausted by turning over in bed. It is not a pleasant sight.
There are a few upsides to this state of being - a very few. I am allowed to wallow in self-pity and trashy television while ill, which can be comforting in its own way. My small grey cat usually comes to snuggle me while I am ensconced in my bed, and her purring is tranquil. I can catch up on all the podcast episodes I’ve missed, and enjoy audiobooks, one right after another, without pause. And the comforting, soothing foods most folks reach for while ill are a positive boon: chicken soup, hot lemon water with honey, pastina, popsicles, ginger chews, juicy, in-season oranges - all delicious. And I give myself permission to sleep the day away, which can be extremely boring but also kind of a nice little break. Maybe that’s really the key to happiness generally - acceptance, gratitude, choosing to be content with a circumstance whenever we can. I cannot promise that I have achieved this cold-induced nirvana, but it certainly helps to give up on fighting the reality of a cold or a sore throat, curl up on the sofa with a cat, a box of tissues, and a substantial collection of old movies or trashy television, and embrace the inevitable down-time. I might feel like I’m the brain in my head, but at the end of the day, my body is running the show in many ways.
I hope, dear reader, that if you find yourself wrapped up in bed with a nasty cold, sipping tea or endlessly blowing your nose, that you give yourself permission to enjoy it as much as you can - to snuggle down in your blankets and give over to sleep, that you indulge in the little treats which will make you feel better, both emotionally and physically, that you do not judge yourself for watching all those episodes of that goofy old show or that comforting movie from your childhood that always makes you feel better. Get well soon.
Jennifer
A Pen Pal
I do not have a dedicated writing pen. That’s not to say that I don’t have pens in my house - I do. They’re scattered around my office, in my husband’s office, sometimes making their way to the kitchen (for grocery lists and recipes, mostly.) But these pens are scraps, leftovers. The most reliable one I have at the moment came from a hotel chain. The one I used most before that was probably from the dollar store - I don’t remember buying it. These are cheap, plastic, ball-point pens, usually with blue or black ink, ink that tends to be sticky and skiddering rather than smooth. I had quite a nice one a while ago, in a dark floral print with a cap and everything, but even that was only a ball-point pen, and it had no way to refill the ink reservoir, so when its little interior plastic tube of ink ran dry, the pen became obsolete. The result is a pencil cup full of dried up, unusued, cheap plastic pens, all dead, and a handful of actually useable writing implements, nearly all of which will have their day in the sun as I write birthday cards and scribble notes to myself, and then will go the way of their older brethren: back in the pencil cup, untouched, until I grow frustrated with the clutter and throw them all out in one furious go.
But, oh, to have a dedicated pen, one that feels good in the hand and writes beautifully, with smooth ink, never sticking. And refillable, ready at a moment’s notice. I appreciate that most folks reach for their keyboards and phones to send messages, but I admit that I cling to paper and pens, charming little hand-drawn, hand-written cards, pleasant mail that makes a nice change from bills and junk. I am in the process now of organising the Christmas cards I send out every year, which simultaneously makes me feel about a million years old, and fills me with joy. Do the people at the post office give me strange looks at my handfuls of red and green envelopes, addressed in my tidiest cursive, or frown a little when I ask for more than one book of stamps? Yes, they do. I do not care. There is something connective, relational, real, about a handwritten note in the mail. I used to handwrite all sorts of things - notes, grocery lists, and rough drafts for schoolwork - but that has drastically dwindled, really down to the last little vestiges of paper mail I insist on sending, especially for the holidays. And wouldn’t it be so thrilling, so certain, wouldn’t it fill a person up with a kind of delightful sureness to reach for the same lovely, well-used pen for every Christmas card, every message of birthday wishes, every letter, every signature? I think it would.
Instead, I am left, as ever, with two much less appealing options: my tip-tip-tapping keyboard and computer, or a handful of nearly-dead plastic pens in ugly colours with broken or missing caps. It is a depressing thought - and yet, the Christmas cards must go out! It’s early, dear reader, I know, for holiday wishes, so instead I’ll send you hope for a comfortable pen grip, the smoothest ink, a smudge-less page, and the perfect pen to write with. Happy scribbling.
Jennifer
A Day at the Beach
Ah, the beach. The very word conjures up images of warm, golden sand, idyllic waves, the sun glittering on the water, and hours of relaxation on a charmingly striped towel under a well-positioned umbrella. Alternatively, that word might evoke images of screaming children, a steaming parking lot with asphalt like lava, sunburns, lost sunglasses, sand in the picnic basket, and swimmer’s itch. Agatha Christie may have loved the beach (indeed, she was an avid surfer, if you can believe it), so for her, the beach probably meant adventure and excitement. I find the beach tiresome. For me, it is not relaxing - it is boring, and usually quite a faff to get there and get home again - a lot of rigmarole, in my estimation, for what turns out to be rather a flat experience. This may be, in part, a result of my own personal failings. I am loath to bring a really good book to the beach for fear of ruining it, so I end up with a ‘beach book’, something light and fluffy, a little bit awful, but crucially, cheap - that way, if sand and surf are not kind to it, I’m less put out. I also burn like a lobster, and spend most of my summer covered wrist to ankle in light-coloured linen and big hats, trying to stave off sun damage and blistering.
Part of this loathing is, no doubt, the horrible, spandex spectre that looms over all such activities: the dreaded bathing suit. I do not enjoy wearing a bathing suit. I do not enjoy purchasing a bathing suit. In all cases, the whole thing feels like a minefield. Finding one that fits and doesn’t dig in or ride up or bunch or slide around or twist or stick or pucker feels miraculous, a moment where angels sing and dolphins dance. I admit that at this juncture in my life, I have not yet experienced such a moment. Even colour presents problems: black feels sombre, too aggressive, especially without a tan (see ‘burns like a lobster’ above for more details), patterns can be tricky, and recently I read that my standard choice of shades of blue or green is not as safe as brighter colours because they lack the visibility of hot pink or vibrant yellow in water. And yet I struggle to imagine myself, decked out in eye-popping, glow-in-the-dark orange, floating in the waves peacefully like a basking shark. Is all this trouble really worth the few hours of languid boredom, stretched out on my towel and fretting about freckles? I am inclined to stay home and forget the beach entirely.
One place where the beach appears, rather surprisingly, is the bathroom. Have you ever noticed the tendency for some people to decorate their bathrooms as though they were the beach? You enter their washroom, close the door behind you, and are confronted by a dazzling array of beach-themed accoutrements. There are sailboat or sea turtle prints hanging on the wall, and the soap is shaped like a flip-flop. The shower curtain features a frieze of shells, echoing the small bowl of shells on the back of the toilet, and the shower curtain rings have starfish designs on them. Everything has to be blue - cerulean, azure, cobalt, sapphire, aquamarine, lapis lazuli. Very bright yellow or orangey-pink accents are just about acceptable. No other colours are permitted. Surfboards, sanddollars, seahorses, maybe even a piece of coral - they will all feature in one way or another. I urge you, dear reader, to investigate your host’s kitchen after you have experienced their beachy bathroom - it is very possible that if the bathroom is the beach, then the kitchen must be a farm, complete with rooster oven mitts, goose-shaped cookie jars, and an inexplicable pig in a chef’s hat. I’ll leave you to your own conclusions, dear reader.
Jennifer
Pirates
It’almost time for Hallowe’en again. The leaves are crisp, the air is chill and tangy, and there are pumpkins, skeletons, cobwebs, and floating fabric ghosts adorning the front steps of nearly every house on the block. I suspect that, if you are handing out candy at your door, or trailing after a group of ghouls and goblins, up and down the street, you may well spot a fair few pirates among the spooky group. They’ll have a tricorn hat and a parrot on one shoulder, an eye patch and a hook for a hand - or very possibly a peg leg. You might notice a puffy white shirt and a cutlass gleaming in the moonlight - for how indeed can a pirate swindle and swashbuckle without it?
I wonder sometimes how a real-life, honest-to-goodness pirate might feel about having become a costume or a caricature, the sort of person who shows up on screen in films with a West Country accent and a roguish smile? Would they be delighted at being thus memorialized? Or would they struggle to understand how we’ve romanticized them, how we’ve washed away all the reasons a person would choose to live outside the law and risk so much?
The movie theatre is full of these pirates - Peter Pan, Hook, The Pirates of the Caribbean, Muppet Treasure Island. And they have their charms, no doubt about it. Tim Curry is particularly appealing as the pirate with a lust for gold and a secret heart of it, too, playing earnestly alongside his fuzzy Muppet co-stars, decked out in what proves to be extremely accurate 18th century garb. He strikes an excellent balance between terrible criminal, quite happy to threaten, steal, lie, and murder to get what he wants, and moral father figure who sacrifices himself at least once to protect Jim Hawkins. I wonder if, after all that complexity is a better representation of real pirates - people, complicated, multilayered people who longed for a way out of poverty and suffering by any means necessary, but weren’t necessarily the embodiment of evil, either. A tricky thing, being a pirate - unless of course, it’s Hallowe’en night, and when the treasure - or candy - has been gathered and stowed, the costume comes off, and life goes back to normal.
Jennifer
Patron Saints
In this week’s episode, we learn that Astarte was a Phoenician goddess responsible for many things—love, beauty, war, and hunting. Quite a laundry list! This is, as we discussed, not dissimilar to Greek and Roman polytheism. As a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with a big yellow book from the library, D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, which had charming illustrations and page after page of Greek gods and goddesses, most of whom were capricious and badly behaved, but came with nifty specialties. Each had fabulous powers and special dedications which determined who prayed to them and for what. So Hermes is the messenger god and herald and therefore the god of communication, travellers, and orators. Aphrodite is obviously the goddess of love and lust. Her long-suffering husband, Hephaestus, is the god of blacksmiths and artisans.
It reminds me of saintly patronage, which defines much of Catholic devotion. There are loads of tragic martyrs, holy men and women, who’ve been saddled with a particular thing - a virtue, a preoccupation, a group of people, a concern, an activity - for which they are responsible. There are the better-known ones, like St. Anthony, to whom you might pray if you have mislaid something, because St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. St. Christopher, patron saint of travellers, receives many prayers for safe car journeys. Devout lawyers pray to St. Alphonsus; archeologists like Max Mallowan might pray to St. Helen of Constantinople. There are saints for academics, Boy Scouts, comedians, dentists, equestrians, farmers and flight attendants, gardeners, hairdressers, ice skaters, janitors and journalists, lighthouse keepers, motorcycle riders, notaries, obstetricians, pasties and poor students, queens, radiologists, secretaries and shepherds, teachers, undertakers, veterinarians, writers, and zookeepers. There are saints for locations, for diseases and injuries, and for specific dangers. And, when in doubt, you can always turn to St Mary, who is the patron saint of cyclists, fishmongers, overseas Filipino workers, harness makers, seafarers, the Spanish Civil Guard, and pilots. But, more generally, she is also the patron saint of all humanity, so as long as you’re a person, then Mary’s for you.
In both the modern Catholic context and in Ancient Greece, Rome, and Phoenicia, too, the way to tell one god or saint from another was by their attributes, as we saw in today’s episode. Astarte is identified by her crescent moon, her doves, or her lions. Aphrodite, who was influenced by the earlier Astarte, is shown with doves, too. Hephaestus always has a smith’s hammer, an anvil, and a pair of working tongs to indicate his profession. And the saints are no different: they each get items, objects, or attributes that identify them, because without those objects, you might find that it’s quite difficult to tell the difference between a sculpture of Mary and a sculpture of St. Catherine or St Theresa of Avila or St. Margaret, or indeed any other female saint.
It does lead me to wonder what, if any, attributes I would have if depicted in a sculpture or a stained glass window. Perhaps Agatha Christie’s would be her typewriter, or perhaps her beloved terrier, Peter, sitting at her feet. And what of our heroine, the great and good Miss Marple? Surely her attribute would have to be her knitting needles and that ubiquitous fleecy white wool!
Jennifer
A Lobster Dinner
At the centre of this week’s mystery is a meal of lobster and salad, bread and cheese, and trifle. Now, bread and cheese probably do not need their own recipe in this context, but today I am offering you both a recipe for a lobster dish and for trifle. These days, lobster and trifle make for quite a fancy dinner, and most folks do not frequently eat a cheese course, so we might consider this meal a historical oddity, a call to another time, where the food on our plates becomes a sort of time machine that brings us back to the 1920s or early 1930s. So let’s go waaaaaay back and enjoy some distinctly historical dishes alongside the Jones’ - but hold the arsenic!
Lobster Newburg
This is a great dish for stretching lobster quite a long way by adding lots of other ingredients so that a relatively small amount of lobster (or indeed any other seafood or firm fish) can feed several people. This recipe, for instance, serves about four. And, of course, as with the story, you can used tinned or frozen lobster, without the shell, which also reduces the cost of the ingredient.
Ingredients:
350g (2 c) cooked lobster meat, chopped
50g (1/4 c) butter
50ml (3 tbsp) sherry or apple cider vinegar
100ml (1/2 c) double cream
1 egg yolk
salt and pepper to taste
pinch of cayenne pepper
buttered toast
Instructions:
Mix the egg yolk with the double cream in a bowl.
Melt the butter in a frying pan, then saute the lobster for about two minutes. After 2 minutes, add the cream-and-yolk mixture, then either sherry or cider vinegar to the pan. Continue cooking the mixture for another 2 or 3 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce reduces and thickens.
Take the pan off the heat, add salt, pepper, and cayenne to taste. If cayenne is a bit much, you can also use smoked paprika, although this will obviously change the flavour of the final dish.
Serve the sauced lobster immediately over buttered toast. If you are eating with others, this dish is meant to be eaten with a fork and knife; if you are alone and care nothing for manners, you can certainly eat it with your hands, tidiness be damned. Serve with a salad or steamed greens.
Trifle
Now we turn our attention to the dessert in question. Trifle, not unlike Lobster Newburg, uses the bits and bobs you might have on hand to create a delicious, cost-efficient dessert that is reasonably easy to assemble but looks quite impressive. The suggestions of fruit are just that: suggestions. If you have other fruit on hand, feel free to use it instead. Keep in mind that most trifle recipes make absolutely massive quantities, because trifles are usually served to crowds at Christmas or special occasions. This recipe is sized down to make it a bit more manageable, but you can reduce or increase the amounts to you taste. This recipe serves about 8 people.
Ingredients
1 8-inch white cake, baked and cooled
1 pt strawberries (fresh or thawed from frozen)
1 pt raspberries (fresh or thawed from frozen)
1/8 c sugar
1/8 c liquor of your choice (sherry is traditional, but just about any spirit would do) or juice (again, you can adjust the flavour profile to your liking)
3.5 oz custard (from powder for an authentically British taste; instant pudding would do in a pinch)
1 c milk
1/2 c whipping cream
1/8 c topping - toasted almond slices, glaceed cherries, sprinkles, chocolate shavings, fresh fruit
Instructions
Cube the white cake and set aside.
In a bowl, add the sugar to the strawberries and let them macerate.
In a separate bowl, add the liquor or juice to the raspberries and let them sit.
Make custard or pudding according to instructions, using the milk.
In a bowl, whip the cream to stiff peaks.
Get your impressive trifle bowl ready. Layer the cake cubes, macerated fruit, and custard into the bowl until you have used up all the ingredients. Top the trifle with the whipping cream and add your toppings. Refrigerate the trifle for at least thirty minutes or until ready to serve.
Enjoy your trifle in charming little dishes with spoons—the cake will have softened and absorbed much of the liquid from the custard, liquor or juice, and fruit, so no forks required! This recipe is enormously flexible - you can use just about any kind of cake, any sort of fruit, whatever flavour of custard or pudding you prefer, and whatever toppings fill you with joy. A chocolate version (chocolate cake, cherries and oranges, orange juice, chocolate pudding, and chocolate shavings) would be decadent for Christmas. Vanilla and lemon flavours with fresh fruit would make a lighter trifle for summer. The whole point of this dish is to use up what you have, so get creative!
Happy eating!Jennifer
A Dark and Stormy Night
Well, dear reader, here we are again, back at the beginning to start our journey into our second novel, The Thirteen Problems! And what good timing it’s all worked out to be! Miss Marple’s cozy collection of short stories just about cries out to be read on a chilly autumn night, with you safely ensconced in your comfiest grandfather chair, a mug of cocoa or a tiny glass of cherry brandy at the ready, and your eager guests’ faces illuminated by a roaring fire and shivering candles. Let the wind wuther and the rain pelt; let storms howl and shutters slam - you are warm and safe in your parlour or drawing room, and facing a more formidable foe in the pages of this book than any storm could pose: murder most foul!
It might feel strange to begin something new in autumn, which is so obviously the winding down of the year in many ways - the trees are shedding their green coats for vibrant gossamer gowns of orange and red and gold; the splendour of gardens is fading to mere memory. And yet, this is also the beginning of apple season and the yearly spate of baking; the beginning of school term; the air whispers of winter’s coming, bringing holidays and icy, wind-pinked cheeks along with it. I know that Yuletide is on its way, if for no other reason than my mother has begun her annual Christmas cake - a sure sign that autumn is reaching its peak, and that the crisp tang in the air is a herald of chillier winds to come. It’s the beginning of the end, the beginning of the death of the year - a terrible, frosted death, and yet beautiful and not without its pleasures.
This season of The Reader’s Museum will hold its own array of delights, dear reader: not only the clever crimes detailed within the pages of our novel, but also a whole host of objects, practices, customs, histories, and experiences. The short stories of this collection fairly teem with objects to consider - in some cases, it was hard to choose just which ones to examine, and which ones to take up as Didactic Panels! But perhaps that is par for the course: this is, after all, a collection of crime, so of course the pages are littered with clues. I have reiterated this fact in today’s episode, but I will take another opportunity to remind you of the inherent spoilers that will inevitably occur throughout this series. So, if you have not yet read The Thirteen Problems, I beseech you to go to and do so immediately! I’ll meet you at the Reader’s Museum when you have finished - as always, the doors are open, admission is free, and Miss Marple awaits us! Onward!
Jennifer
That’s a Wrap!
Phew! Dear reader, we have made it to the end of our first book and first series, on our maiden voyage through the Reader’s Museum! Hurrah! We’ve journeyed through the highs and lows of Anne’s new life in Avonlea: books, bosom friends, birch trees, and blunders! And we’ve been joined by scholars and specialists who’ve enriched our discussions and enlivened this book anew.
When I began the Reader’s Museum, I hoped most of all to recreate the kinds of satisfying, rich, varied, and close conversations I had with friends during school, and, to my delight, that dream has come true! As we bring this series to a close and prepare for the next one’s beginning, it’s tempting to focus solely on the next horizon, the next project, the next series - and, to be fair, those futures are exciting and full of the kinds of ambitions and challenges and triumphs that call out to Anne by the end of this novel. However, I think there is something good and valuable in pausing to celebrate achievements and milestones, both big and small. I had an absolute blast recording the wrap party episode with Emma and Kennis, and I hope you enjoy listening to it, dear reader! And after tomorrow’s episode is launched, I’ll be taking myself off for a forest bath in a nearby small town - an especially effective one because the leaves are turning and the sky is a painful, never-ending blue, and the air is spicy with the tang of autumn. What better forest bath could one ask for?
We are moving on to other books and other objects in the coming series, for which I am fidgeting with excitement, but I know I’ll be coming back to this first foray through the Reader’s Museum, to re-encounter the objects and practices and peculiarities we’ve met so far. And, similarly, Anne will always be there for us - waiting in the pages of this novel, ready to accompany us in all moments of life. I suspect that she may be walking a little way behind me in the woods tomorrow afternoon, delighting in the rich and final finery of the trees. And I think that tomorrow, perhaps more than ever, I will be of one mind with our beloved heroine: very glad to live in a world where there are Octobers!
Jennifer
A Walk in the Woods
The Japanese have a concept called ‘shirin-yoku’ or ‘forest bathing’, a practice of immersing your senses in a forest atmosphere (usually by going for a walk in the woods) to promote health and well-being. Taking a forest bath definitely helps to cleanse a person of the grime and grumpiness of the city. There are a few forests that fit the bill within a short drive from my home, so come along with me. The drive will give you a sense of what is about to occur. When we begin, brick and concrete and steel and glass will whiz by your window. But slowly, you’ll notice that buildings and cars are replaced with fields and stands of trees, and the traffic will subside. The colour of the world will seem to shift from grey and black to a kaleidoscope of green, inviting and soothing, and your eyes will feel less tired already.
When you step out of the car, we’ll still be in the parking lot, so there will still be the noise of cars, the smell of asphalt, the humourless painted yellow lines that keep everything in check. There may be a few people around, some with dogs, some with children. But as we make our way down the smaller of the two trails, the one that traces the edge of a lake and skirts the boundary of the forest, you’ll find a sort of calm settle over you like a blanket. The air will be scented with pine and poplar, and in the company of stately trunks and fallen stumps, you’ll start to feel right-sized: not too big, and not too small. You might notice your shoulders relax, and your breathing slow as we move deeper into the woods, where the trees and their canopies cast shadows, but don’t worry - it won’t feel frightening. That lowered light is a kind of respite from the glare and heat of the sun, or a protective barrier that slows the wind as it passes through, turning it into a gentle, teasing breeze.
The forest floor is kind. The earth beneath your feet is soft and spongy, made even more forgiving by the blanket of drying pine needles and carpets of moss. You’ll find that your pace will slow as you take in the shades and tints around you: genteel greens, deep rust, and loamy black, aging to brown. The woods are alive, with light and colour and the music of a forest - birds and insects, trilling their daily tunes, the crackle of twigs underfoot, the rustle and shiver of leaves dancing in the wind. And yet you’ll find yourself growing still, quiet. We won’t need to talk at all to know the woods are working their magic.
The trail is a long one - it loops around the lake, and then jogs back on itself a ways, until we arrive back where we started. On the surface, it might seem that we’ve gone in circles, going nowhere in a big hurry - but that’s not true at all, is it? We’ve gone somewhere peaceful, restorative, invigorating and gentle, and we haven’t hurried a single moment of it. We’ve had our forest bath and come out clean, refreshed, clear-eyed on the other side. You’ll come with me again, won’t you?
Jennifer
Marlowe
When I began my PhD, the world felt very uncertain. I was living away from home, away from my partner, most of my friends had moved from our tiny college town. It was 2016, and, I thought, things could not get much worse (the height of hubris in retrospect, I know.) I was feeling distinctly unmoored. So, in a fit of foolishness, the kind of thing that happens when you have grown up money but a child’s brain, I went to a local animal sanctuary with the great and good Kennis Forte, and brought home an eighty-dollar dog. He was, I was told, eight years old and beagle-ish: he had the requisite floppy ears, the white-dipped tail, the ever-unsatisfied nose. His proportions were wrong, though. He had a too-long body and a too-small head, and feet that did not fit his stubby legs. I called him Little Big Foot for a while as a result. I named him for Phillip Marlowe, the main character from The Big Sleep, because surely every hound ought to be a detective, sniffing out clues.
At first, we did not get along. He was, at best, ambivalent about me, caring only for his walks and inspecting every single individual blade of grass he encountered. He peed on my floors, nearly every day, for about six months. I spent a fortune in vet bills trying to figure out what was wrong. After that agonizing six months, the vet finally figured it out, and Marlowe became a much happier dog very suddenly. Who could blame him? You don’t feel like making friends when you’re sick. Now he would follow me around the apartment, and deigned to sleep in the dog bed I provided, next to my bed, instead of on the floor in the living room. A typical old man, he snored like a freight train.
Our walks became joyful. Still slow and painstaking, but pleasant. He learned to sit, not to bay at 7 am, to come when called (mostly), and walked like a gentleman on his leash. He also learned that the local video rental store had dog biscuits behind the counter, and so whenever we took a right turn out the front door and began to make our way down to the lake, heading in the direction of said store, his pace would increase significantly, ears swaying, ignoring sights and smells. He was a dog on a mission. The walk home was a different story: now tired, having had his treat and faced with a walk that was entirely uphill, he dragged his paws and stopped to sniff literally anything. The walk home could be twice as long as the walk down.
He took the move to Quebec with us like a champ, evidently delighted by all the new smells and adapting better than I did to a new city. He made friends with the dog across the hall, and as he grew older, he enjoyed trips to the park in a wagon, sitting like a pharaoh on his blanket, his head tilted to smell the air, a regal expression of disdain and ambivalence at the people who exclaimed over him.
He died here. It was hardly a surprise: he was old, had been old when I got him, and for as long as I had known him, he’d had trouble with his kidneys, his pancreas, his spleen, with arthritis in his shoulders. His once rusty head had gone snowy-white: I called him sugar-faced, trying to push away the dread that filled my stomach when people commented on his age. We were told what to look for and when to go to the vet. Just as spring was ripening into summer, my husband woke me in the night, voice urgent and low. It was time.
We were very lucky. It didn’t feel like that at the time. It felt like I would never be happy again, like I would never stop crying. But the vets were kind, and we were able to bring him home to spend time with him and say goodbye. It took me months to sleep normally again, without the sound of his snoring.
That was three years ago now. We still don’t have another dog. Sometimes I see a lady in our neighbourhood walking her cheerful little beagle, barely out of puppyhood, and a horrible part of me wants to warn her: that this dog, this sweet little dog whom she loves so much, will die and break her heart. That, like Stuart McLean says,
“We do this thing. We open our hearts to the world around us. And the more we do that, the more we allow ourselves to love, the more we are bound to find ourselves one day…standing in the kitchen of our lives, surrounded by the ones we love, and feeling empty, and alone, and sad, and lost for words, because one of our loved ones, who should be there, is missing. Mother or father, brother or sister, wife or husband, or a dog or cat. It doesn't really matter. After a while, each death feels like all the deaths, and you stand there like everyone else has stood there before you, while the big wind of sadness blows around and through you.”
Marlowe was a great dog and a better friend. He cost me eighty dollars and utter heartbreak. I’d pay it all again in a moment.
Jennifer
The Future is Female
I have lived a life that is dominated by women in many ways. Art history is largely female in my experience, and out of a department of about sixty people, there were two, maybe three men - the tiny minority, by a wide margin. I went to an all-girls’ high school, where male teachers were rare, and any jobs that needed doing (sports teams, science fairs, provincial exams, the yearly musical, art shows, fundraising, Spirit Week, holiday parties and concerts, volunteering, letter-writing campaigns, you name it) were planned, organised, populated, advertised, and carried out by women and girls. Math and science were not ‘male’ subjects: all the classes everyone took were, of course, counted as ‘girly’ subjects because we were girls, and we were taking them, so… you know.
People sometimes assume that girls, when grouped together, become catty and aggressive with each other. I don’t remember that being the defining feature of my social life at school at all. Instead, I recall a kind of shedding - not a pleasant image, but suitable, I think - a shedding of the expectation, the demand, to be pretty. It’s a rent that women are expected to pay for the privilege to exist in public, but for at least five days a week for six years of my life, that rent was forgiven. In seventh grade, the earliest a girl could start at this school, we earnestly tried to do our hair and look cute in our terrible uniforms, and eigth grade inevitably brough on a wave of kilt rolling to ensure the shortest possible skirt (and a roll of fabric around one’s middle), but from then on, there was a distinct drop off in fussing over looks. Perfectly coiffed waves? Absolutely not - we opted for ponytails, braids, or broccoli-shaped buns twisted at the very top of the head, caring little for loose strands - anything to keep your hair out of your face. We also generally ditched daily makeup of any kind - mostly, the logic seemed to be that an extra few minutes of sleep each morning was vastly more valuable than a face full of foundation. At a certain point, we all seemed to accept that there was no way to look cute in the uniform, so we gave that up, too. A girl in a knee- or calf-length skirt was either in seventh grade, because her kilt was new and not yet hemmed, or in twelfth grade, because she wasn’t trying to show off her legs anymore, and didn’t care.
Instead of hyperfocusing on looks, I remember an air of earnestness. It was generally a good thing to be at the top of the class, and my classmates became invested in school projects, classroom discussions, and studying for tough exams. Participation was cool - or, perhaps more accurately, participation was fun, and we didn’t care so much about being cool. We wept openly when we watched Little Women in class, and there was no retaliation, no teasing, no shame in it. Now, it wasn’t a utopia: did every girl get along with every other girl? No, of course not. Was everyone good at everything? Obviously not. A good friend of mine was a ferocious volleyball player, and I was terrible at sports and gym class. But there wasn’t a feeling that somehow her upcoming match was more or less exciting than my weekly choir practice - especially considering she was in choir with me. The clique-y, rigid expectations for teens that tend to show up in John Hughes movies just didn’t seem that important in my experience.
I put that down to the lack of boys. There was no one to impress, so we got on with other stuff that seemed a lot more important - like what class costume we could come up with for Halloween, or how to get away with wearing sweatpants under our skirts without detention. As we learned in this week’s episode, yes, single-sex education was developed out of a biological misapprehension about women’s bodies, but the outcomes were great, at least for me. There are apparently studies that show that single-sex education is wonderful for girls, but terrible for boys, and the reason seems to be that when left without their usual targets (women), boys turn on each other. The reaction from some quarters to this news is that we ought not to have single-sex education, to protect boys and young men from violence and bullying, so that women can assume that burden, keeping the boys safe? Cool. I’m more inclined to wonder if we shouldn’t convince boys to stop targeting anyone at all, but hey, what do I know? All I can tell you is that I have enjoyed a distinctly female life, learning, working, studying, and growing alongside women who are funny, ferocious, smart, driven, kind, empathetic, loving, and more.
Jennifer
All Grown Up
I don’t know about you, dear listener, but one of the major parts of my shift from childhood to adulthood was makeup. As a little kid, I loathed face paint with the fire of a thousand suns. It dried tight and itchy on my skin, which I could not bear. I was the only child at the Christmas concert who happily wore the little paper antlers but rejected the red thumbprint of face paint on my nose to complete my Rudolph costume for our performance of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” I maintain that the show was not drastically altered by my bare, paint-free face, and really, there is only one Rudolph - a whole chorus of tiny four-year-old Rudolphs would have made for quite a different song.
This approach to makeup changed as the products improved and I got older. As a ten-year-old, I had one strawberry and one root beer scented lip balm, with little keychains attached to the lids so I could dangle them from my knapsack every day at school. The strawberry one added no colour at all to a person’s face, but the root beer one was dark, and very slightly tinted your mouth. The result was probably more “I just ate a popsicle” than “sophisticated wash of lip colour”, but my ten-year-old self was satisfied by the product at the time. I’m not sure they actually did anything to address dry lips, but they smelled so good, and all the other little girls in my grade had one, too. It felt nice to be included and compare notes about our favourite scents, and admit to one another that we were often tempted to eat them because of their delicious and startlingly realistic scents.
I was in dance classes as a kid, too, and that was where I had my first introduction to actual makeup - although, of course, stage makeup is quite different (thank goodness) to the sort of stuff you’d wear on a normal day. This look comprised thick, pancake foundation, quite a bit too orange for my skin, paired with ferocious red lipstick, slashes of vibrant rouge, extending into my hairline, and worst of all, black eyeline and mascara - which, because I was young, was usually applied by someone’s mother, who held my forehead in a vice grip and normally stabbed me in the eye with the kohl. Not a pleasant experience. Even more difficult was getting all the gunk off after the fact. Stage makeup is like concrete - thick, flamboyant concrete. I miss dancing, but I do not miss the makeup.
I dabbled in a more manageable look as a teenager, but never really developed a consistent habit of wearing it. For school dances, I started wearing sparkly eyeshadow, frosted lip gloss, and aggressively applied winged eyeliner (the early 2000s were a challenging time). I read magazines with my friends, poring over pictures and how-to guides in those heady, distant days before the internet and video platforms filled with cheerful makeup tutorials, demanding that girls use about sixty products to achieve an acceptable face (each one accompanied by a heart-stopping price tag, too). I did not have dozens of makeup brushes or loads of products. Instead, I got my glittery eyeshadow from the drugstore and applied it with my fingers or one of those horribly useless little triangles of foam glued to a plastic stick, which came along with the makeup. The results were awkward and amateur, but then again, just about everyone I knew was working with the same tools, so we all looked roughly the same level of bizarre. There were some strange products and trends, typical of their time, which I am delighted to have left behind: putting foundation or concealer on your lips, for instance, which resulted in a sort of ‘kissed by correction fluid’ look, or the insistence that any inch of visible skin be covered in shimmer.
I will say that my heart aches a little for girls today. I would have dissolved, I’m sure, in the face of the pressure to live up to social media models and YouTube tutorials, demanding that young teens do their best to look airbrushed and colour-corrected and flawless all the time. My makeup was bad, but maybe that was good? Maybe it was okay that, as a literal child, I hadn’t perfected the accoutrements of adulthood? I’m sure the generation before me probably had similar thoughts about new products and changes to making up when I was a teenager. I’m sort of both grateful that mousse-textured foundation and eyeliner pencils you lit with a lighter to melt the wax are behind us. On the other hand, that time of life was exciting: we were in a big hurry to grow up and thrive, and makeup seemed like one of the ways to do that. But you know what they say, nostalgia’s not what it used to be. And, thankfully, neither is the makeup.
Jennifer
Telephone
As I sit at my desk, setting about to write today’s blog, I can feel the weight of my cell phone in my pocket. Where do any of us go without our phones these days? But they’ve obviously become more than just the simple devices that let us talk to our long-distance relatives or best friends or mothers or the bank. Now they’re entertainment, miniature computers, games, cameras, televisions, radios, GPS devices, watches, calculators, and perhaps worst of all, distractions, all rolled into one. I routinely find myself scrolling, or worse, doom-scrolling these days, trying to numb out the negative feelings that seem to crowd around me, face illuminated by the blue light of my screen, waiting for me to grow tired of swiping through content on a never-ending dopamine dive, waiting for me to put the phone down so they can come crashing back in again. Like the nightlight in my bathroom keeps away Gary Oldman Dracula, who lives in my shower, my little phone keeps away the goblins that live in my brain. At least, for a little while.
But other goblins come out to play whenever my phone is in my hand. Boredom, exhaustion, dry eyes and bad posture, and a rollercoaster of anticipation: the joy doesn’t come from watching that cute cat video or reading that insightful poem: it comes as we swipe our thumbs up the screen, eager for the next thing, the next piece of ‘content’ (hateful word), hoping against hope that the next one will be the one to make us feel better. And then the next one. And the next one. And the next one. Somehow hours can pass by, and eventually this rollercoaster flatlines. If I’m perfectly honest with myself, the phone doesn’t make the bad feelings go away and leave space for good ones. It numbs everything, a sort of mental Lidocaine, turning down the volume on the noise and chatter in my mind.
And yet to put down this little hunk of plastic and metal feels nigh-on impossible. To give up a cell phone now seems like the same commitment an anchoress of old would make. Medieval women, ususally nuns or sisters, would offer to be walled up in a church or cathedral, sometimes an abbey, sort of a very intense version of hermitage, living out the remainder of their days with no contact, no interaction with the outside world -nothing. Usually, they would go quite mad and have visions of Christ and write metaphysical poetry. Without my phone, I couldn’t call my parents, or speak regularly with my friends, or get around my city easily, or know what the weather would be, or check my email, or listen to podcasts, or - and perhaps most pressingly - numb out the terrible feelings that sometimes follow me around. To be all alone with myself and my own thoughts, bricked up in a wall somewhere, sounds like a sort of torture. And yet an anchoress chose her fate willingly. Maybe I ought to put the phone down and walk away - perhaps poetry and visions of salvation wait for me on the other side of scrolling. Maybe that’s where enlightenment and fulfillment lie.
Ah, my phone has buzzed. I should really check my email. And a few minutes scrolling never hurt anyone…
Jennifer
The Seaside
I am, at my heart, a Prairie girl - moutains are all very well in post cards, but in reality I find any sort of incline the cause of a spoiled landscape. So disorganised, so irregular. Driving in the mountains is hazardous, and walking uphill is uncomfortable. I know it’s an insupportable opinion to hold, but I cleave to it still - the earth may not be flat, but I sure do like a flat horizon and a BIG sky, one that comes in startling colours (minty green before a storm, painfully deep blue in the height of summer, jewel-toned and glowing at sunset, pale gold in the morning, velvety black and dotted with diamonds at midnight, periwinkle when it rains - increasingly, hazy orange when fires rage in the north).
But I will admit that this certainty was challenged when I first saw the Atlantic in person. I was standing on the pier at Dún Laoghaire, having gone past the pebble beach and the ornate pergola, right to the very farthest outreach of the pier’s stretched arm, to get as close to the ocean as I could. How strange to stand on the shore and know that home was on the other side of that briny sea, but only able to see wave upon wave, dark and foreboding, but strangely seductive, too. Even stranger was the place where the ocean met the land: Dún Laoghaire was tidy, charming, quaint, with pretty treed streets and inviting little lanes and quite a nice church and the most aggressively friendly people I’d ever encountered, anywhere. There were swanky hotels and cozy little inns standing shoulder to shoulder along the cobbled streets, with bright facades, like heavily made-up faces, or stately Victorian shops in ruddy brick. All very civilised. And then right next to all this civilisation was the wild water of the Atlantic - churning and hurling itself against that pebbled beach and the walls of the pier. I wondered if the people of Dún Laoghaire had purposefully leaned into the rigid charm of the town, in an effort to put from their minds the wildness of the ocean that beat against their shore daily. Either way, it was a remarkable sight, and for the first time I began to have an inkling about sailors of old who longed to go to sea, despite its dangers.
The more staid aspects of this little seaside town were very pleasant, too, to give them their dues. It was very soothing to stroll up and down the pier, eating a 99 (soft serve with a chocolate stuck in it) to the dulcet tones of seagulls and the crash of waves. I stayed in a funny little bed and breakfast, full of twisted stairwells and mismatched furniture, where the proprietress made me an Irish breakfast and insisted that I eat it with so much vigour that I could hardly refuse, despite my day of travel ahead. I wondered, then, too, if that aggressive friendliness which seemed to greet me wherever I went in Ireland, was typical of island nations for whom the sea’s aggression was never distant - although, on second thought, the English are similarly insular, in both senses of that word, - and they were, in my experience, much less likely to offer to help with my luggage or holler ‘what’s the story?’ at me as I got on a bus. I hope to go back to Ireland soon - perhaps to find out more about those fiercely friendly folks, but also to reacquaint myself with the Atlantic again.
Jennifer
You’ve Got Mail
Autumn is not quite upon us yet, dear reader, but I am finding myself thinking increasingly of that best (and shortest) of seasons. Spring is cheerful, summer is lazy and languid, winter starts out invigorating and then slowly melts to a sodden, dirty grey puddle, but autumn - oh, autumn is beautiful and perfect from start to finish. The air gets crisp and tangy, even before it properly cools down, and the riot of colour from the finery of the trees never ceases to surprise and delight me. There are satisfying thunderstorms that rinse the heat and stickiness of summer away, leaving cool breezes and puddles pooling on the asphalt. At its commencement, autumn is for reaping summer’s bounty: ripe stone fruit and corn-on-the-cob, apple picking and more zucchini than you can shake a stick at. This is followed by what I now think of as ‘stationery season.’ I am no longer in school, but the urge to stock up on fresh pencils and pristine notebooks - as Anne would say, ‘with no mistakes in them’ - hits me like a freight train. Then it deepens into rusts and golds and brilliant oranges, ideal for cider and anything made with pumpkin, for cozy sweaters and chunky socks. In turn, autumn grows spooky and shivery: rustling leaves, encroaching dark, and the Witching Hour! And finally, autumn lays its head on a pillow, turns over, and falls asleep, giving way to winter, having had it’s last colourful hurrah. I know the New Year technically happens in January, but after literal decades of school, it’s hard not to think of the end of summer (the Sunday of the year, I always think), as the Old Year bowing out, and autumn as the New Year stepping in to take its place.
All of this charming and cozy fall goodness must needs be accompanied by another autumnal ritual, at least in my house: autumn movies. For whatever reason, there are a handful of films that not only take place in the fall, but seem to fairly sing of the season. I tend to think of them as ‘golden’ movies, or ‘oboe movies’ - because their colour palettes tend to feature autumnal colours so much, and their soundtracks accent the oboe, what we might consider the musical equivalent of a goose - very autumnal. Fly Away Home, Rudy, Sweet Home Alabama, Sleepless in Seattle, Practical Magic, Little Women, Dead Poet’s Society, When Harry Met Sally, and yes, You’ve Got Mail. While different in many ways, the characters in these films have one thing in common: they all seem to have enviable knitwear. These aren’t perfect films, but they are the movies that seem to align best with this time of year, so I dutifully make a cup of tea, put out some fresh baking, cocoon myself in a blanket, and watch them nearly every weekend from September to the end of November. You’ve Got Mail begins its plot in autumn - more specifically, autumn in New York - and when Meg Ryan waxes poetic about bouquets of sharpened pencils, it’s hard not to get nostalgic and yes, perhaps a little weepy about them with her.
The letters of this week’s episode, and the ‘oboe movies’ that I’ll be watching soon, both speak to nostalgia, the yearly pause that autumn brings, the beginnings of new journeys, and the deaths of the old. Perhaps Maya Angelou put it best in her poem, Preacher, Don’t Send Me:
I'd call a place
pure paradise
where families are loyal
and strangers are nice,
where the music is jazz
and the season is fall.
Promise me that
or nothing at all.
Jennifer
Testing, Testing
By the time I reached my first class in university, I was quite familiar - too familiar, in fact - with exams. But a new adversary was waiting for me in ARTH 1200 - the first-year course, a requisite for the following four years of art history classes. That was the slide test. In a darkened room, with a slide projector facing a screen, we were barraged with images, sometimes dozens of them, and asked to identify the image, its maker, its material, date, and two or three points of significance. This was rounded off with a few images paired together to prompt the essay portion of the test. We did these a handful of times per semester, the worst cases being when the tests were cumulative, and we had to keep the prehistoric cave paintings firmly in mind even as we juggled early Renaissance painters.
Some of these tests felt fair, reasonable, even. Even those cumulative tests in the first year felt doable, because it’s fairly straightforward to differentiate an Archaic Greek kouros sculpture from a Golden Age Islamic mosque in Cordoba. Were there moments when I forgot who painted The Raft of the Medusa and stared, unblinkingly, eye twitching, at the projected image, willing it with all my being to give up the answer? Yes, of course. It’s Gericault, by the way. But, generally speaking, slide tests in the first year were okay.
When I got to upper-level classes that were more specific, things got trickier. There is an in-between period in an art history degree where you have moved beyond the general, buffet-style first-year course wherein you cover dozens of cultures and several millennia in a term. Still, you have not yet made it to the research-and-paper-heavy fourth-year classes, where endless essays replace slide tests. These were the years of ARTH 1320 (Medieval Art) and ARTH 1450 (Chinese Landscape Painting) and, perhaps most difficult of all, CLAS 1340 and 1350. You’ll notice that those course codes are not in the Art History department, but in Classics - a new field, and one to which I did not have an immediate attachment. I like textiles, and those are pretty thin on the ground in the study of Ancient Greece and Rome. Instead of chitons and togas, we studied kylix after kylix, amphora after amphora. Were they distinguishable? Barely, and only by the figures painted on their surfaces. To make matters worse, the professor of CLAS 1340 (Greek Art), a man with an impressive moustache and a complete disdain for students, did not provide us with the slides to study. Instead, we were expected to memorize the images after a single viewing during class time. I hastily scribbled little sketches of each piece of art alongside my notes, hoping against hope that I would remember that the kantharos decorated with Hercules fighting the Nemean lion was from the 3rd century BC, while the kantharos painted with Hercules fighting the Lernean hydra was from the 2nd century BC—maddening stuff. The following section was Roman Art (CLAS 1350), taught by a different professor who was a bit more forgiving but completely obsessed with slipper lamps. Not a class went by that we did not spend some time, usually, quite a long time, talking about slipper lamps. They are small, palm-sized oil lamps made of clay and resemble a slipper, with one pointed end and one rounded end. I remember very little from the rest of that class.
I have now been on the other side of this equation, as it were, teaching first and second-year courses to students who similarly do not relish slide tests. I have tried to be a bit kinder to them, offering them the slides to study from beyond class hours, and avoiding tricksy questions such as those in my ARTH 1420 course (Byzantine Art), where I had to differentiate the Church of St. Demetrius in Vladimir patronised by Tzar Dimitri, or the Church of St. Vladimir in Dimitri patronised by Tsar Vladimir, who was Tzar Dimitri’s eldest son. I jest, but only just. And I offer them the same mnemonics I developed to survive these tests, such as the parts of a cruciform cathedral set to the tune of “Head and Shoulders” or to memorise the artworks in order so they know that Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait definitely comes before Sonia Delauney’s Rythme (1556 and 1938, respectively). I will admit that, while marking is not generally a joyful experience, sometimes the desperate attempts at answers or go-for-broke responses become highlights in the drudgery of grading. I will also confess that I am not totally convinced that slide tests (and exams more generally) are the best tools for adjudicating a student’s work or progress, but here we are. To all those art history students who are in the process of plowing through their own slide tests, I can only promise that this too shall pass - slide tests will eventually become a nostalgic experience about which you will wax poetic, as I have just done.
Jennifer
Night Light
Nighttime is just about the most comfortable part of my day. Partially, that is because the heat and humidity tend to drop - a bit - so while the daytime feels like living in a pot of hot soup, things become marginally more pleasant and bearable once the sun is down. I can go outside for a walk, or leave the window open and enjoy the delicious breaths of perfumed wind that drift in, bringing the scent of daylilies with them. Things become quieter, too. I turn the fans off at night, so the constant whir of their blades and motors stops only when day has ended. I’m sure you can tell by now, dear reader, that summer is not my favourite season, and the kind of humidity one finds out East is still foreign to me - and I to it.
I have lived all my life in cities. Two big ones, and one medium one, and for a brief time, a tiny one, really more of a town, which just squeaked past the population requirements, pushing it toward city status. In all cases, I have been used to the soundtrack that usually accompanies such places, especially at night. The thrum of cars, the indistinct murmur of people talking, of neighbours walking overhead and dogs barking in backyards. This is my normal. But every once in a while, especially in summer, I long for a different kind of night music.
‘The Lake’ is a kind of catch-all term that people from the Prairies use to describe leaving the city. “I’m going to the lake” could mean there is an actual body of water at said destination, or it could mean roughing it in a campground with a tent, or it could mean a carpeted summer home with a dishwasher and a flat screen television. In my childhood, ‘the lake’ meant a cottage facing out over a dark, root beer brown lake in the White Shell (the lake was quite safe, just full of tannins). The cottage had non-potable water, mismatched furniture, and black bears, so our trash had to be driven to a special garbage site and locked in a caged dumpster. There was a green canoe, an orange paddle boat, and a dock with a rickety ladder so you could inch your way into the freezing water, one rung at a time. The living room of this cottage is burned in my memory, very likely because of a pair of taxidermied ducks on one wall, and a similarly stuffed goose over the television set, which did not get a signal but could play the three or four VHS tapes on offer. I watched Muppet Treasure Island on repeat until my parents were close to mutiny themselves.
Daytime at ‘the lake’ was full of swimming and cavorting around in the woods and devouring watermelon and swimming some more and taking one of the boats out to see the litle island in the middle of the lake, and reading on the dock and throwing dried peas to the flock of geese that visited and hanging towels to dry on the porch and banging the screen door and using my father’s binoculars to spot otters and muskrat and practicing somersaults in the lake and hunting for sliders and playing in the reeds and losing a shoe in the mud and listening for mice in the boathouse and running everywhere. There was too much to do and only so much daylight.
Night was a different matter. I was not keen on the dark at home, in my streetlight-lit suburb, but at the lake, the blackness that settled over everything wasn’t just the dark - it was The Dark. I would lie awake sometimes, trying to see anything, my eyes wide and staring into nothing, but there was no light to be had. Going to the bathroom or getting a cup of water was a terrifying prospect to a pre-teen with an overactive imagination. And when there is no light, no visual data to be had, one becomes very aware of sounds. There were birds who sang themselves to sleep as the sun dropped, and sometimes a loon would let out a crazed, heartbroken whoop in the night, but mostly nighttime brought a symphony of insects. There were crickets (very pleasant) and cicadas (horrible), and worst of all, the solitary mosquito, with its squealing, maddening hum, searching for a late-night snack in the dark - and I was the snack. Of course, the minute you turned on a light, the droning would stop. Was there a more satisfactory, glorious moment, though, when you did finally slam a hand down on said mosquito, and your room would go blissfully, beautifully quiet?
I had a little battery-operated toy lantern, which I used as a nightlight. It was green plastic and shaped like an old-fashioned hurricane lantern, with a handle on top and a flat, circular base. It threw a wan pool of light in my otherwise pitch-black room, casting shadows on the walls and keeping the monsters in my mind at bay. They say you can never go back, which is true, but, oh, dear reader, what I wouldn’t give for the deep, untroubled sleep of a ten-year-old who had played herself to exhaustion, watched Muppet Treasure Island until her eyelids grew heavy, and then drifted into dreams in the darkest, quietest, most peaceful room on earth, her nightlight burning faithfully beside her.
Jennifer
Going to the Ex
There is one Exhibition in my hometown every summer, although it is not a replica of the Great Exhibition: it’s more of a temporary theme park, with rides, games, fried food, and cheap plastic trinkets. I’m not wild about rollercoasters, so I’ve never been the Ex. My preference definitely swings towards events that are more specific to the Prairies and Midwest: agricultural fairs. These usually contain some combination of horse shows and cattle competitions, prizes for the biggest pumpkin or best rooster, festivals dedicated to corn and apples, sheep shearing, tractor pulls, and, charmingly, children’s pig wrangling. You can find a startling array of jams and preserves, wood carvings, quilts, ceramics, and other useful knick-knacks at these events, complementing the livestock and poultry.
Preparation for a fair of this kind is key. You will be on your feet all day, so comfortable shoes are a must. But there will also be every domesticated animal known to North America, so it’s best to skip your brightest white sneakers, and closed-toed shoes are preferable. It will be blisteringly hot, so a big hat and light clothes are a good bet. Do not try to look like a farmer or a cowboy - the real ones will be able to spot you a mile away, and frankly, so will everyone else. Be ready to drink lots of water and reapply sunscreen like it’s going out of style.
You will start with the horses. They will be surprising - you are very likely to see horses bigger than you thought it possible for horses to be. Seventeen, eighteen hands high, with hooves like dinner plates and backs you cannot see over. These are the gentle giants, the plough and draft horses, descendants of the muscle on farms of old. They are intimidating to look at, but usually quite sweet in nature. The ones you want to watch for are the ponies. Small, barrel-bellied little hellions, with wild eyes and nasty tempers, Shetlands are especially moody. As a general rule, I avoid them entirely. In all cases, regardless of size, their barns will smell pleasantly of sweet hay and manure, of homemade fly spray and hoof oil. This is a divine perfume, exclusive to such events.
There will be cows next. These will be the cleanest cows you’ve ever seen. They will be, like the draft horses, astonishing in size, and positively glowing. They will chew their cud placidly as an energetic teenager curries their backs with aggressive swipes. The calves, weaners, and stirks will be curious and inclined to explore everything with nuzzling noses and tongues. Like human toddlers, they explore the world by putting things in their mouths.
If there are sheep, they will be the most delightful of all the livestock. Their lambs will stick close by, tails wagging at startling speed, especially when feeding. The sheep, too, will be cleaner than any you’re likely to encounter, but that might be hard to spot at first. Generally, they are decked out in blankets or fly sheets, little sheep-shaped outfits that cover them, nose to tail, to protect them from flies and keep their gleaming fleeces clean in their stalls. Most of these sheets go over the sheep’s head, with eye and ear holes cut out. They tend to have a sort of Sheep from Space look about them, like little sheepy astronauts, which is very possibly the most charming thing you’ll see all day.
You will admire chickens and roosters with unusual plumage, especially those with feathery feet. You’ll exclaim over the excitement of sheepdog trials and the excruciating sweetness of little pink piglets, nosing in straw and staring up at you through impossibly long lashes. There will be dog and cat shows, and the usual solo llama farm represented by some very bad-tempered llamas, alongside the enthusiastic knitter who raises them for their wool. She - and it is always nearly ‘she’ - will be more than happy to show you how a spinning wheel works, and sell you a skein or two of her finest alpaca. Very often, the creature who produced the wool in question will be made known to you on the label, so you can say ‘thank you’ to Betsy, Pumpernickel, or Steve for their gift.
A word on food: the choices on offer may make you quite giddy. Turkey legs, roasted and eaten like a medieval lord; huge sandwiches, impossible to eat with dignity; funnel cakes and ice cream, melting down your chin; cotton candy, sticky and sickly sweet, in unnatural colours; and gallons of lemonade, with significant pucker power. Tread with caution - fair food is one area in life where less is more.
When you have seen every possible stall and show, filled your arms with jars of pickles and jellies and wildflower honey and your mind with memories, it will be time to pack up and go home, to say goodbye to the fair until next year. I can promise you the best sleep of your life after a day in the sun, and a newfound appreciation for the smell of manure. I’ll meet you there next summer.
Jennifer