Of Mice and Milne
I am a big fan of children’s literature. There, I said it. I have strongly held opinions about kids’ books, many of which would make me deeply unpopular with the majority of English-speaking Canada, so I choose to keep them to myself…mostly. On a little dedicated shelf in my office, you will find current gems cheek-by-jowl with old classics and some surviving copies from my own childhood. Picture books and beginner novels, books of poetry and nursery rhymes, fairytales and folklore - it’s all there. You’ll find a startling number of protagonist mice and rabbits, which the author and critic Bruce Handy posits as popular choices because children, also being small and relatively powerless in a big, wide, wild world, connect with them. From an illustrator’s point of view, I think it might also be because rabbits and mice are easier to draw than children, and much cuter in little jackets, but what do I know?
Most historical children’s books did not feature mice or rabbits or bears or Heffalumps - they were religious tracts about either extremely horrible children who died young and went to Hell, or extremely saintly children who died young and went to Heaven. Not great choices, all things considered. It puts me in mind of Jane Eyre, who, when asked how she will avoid the fire and brimstone of Hell, responds boldly that she must “keep well and not die.” Wise words from a ten-year-old.
But much like the prayers and hymns found in the Peep of Day series mentioned in this week’s chapter, the texts of these many and varied children’s books on my shelf have become a sort of shorthand in my family - books like The House at Pooh Corner and The World of Christopher Robin were such common reading fodder in my childhood home that snippets of poems and stories and the gentle jokes Milne included have taken up residence in the Burgess family dialect. There are a handful of Sherry Fitch poems that are similarly well-represented. A series of picture books by Lynley Dodd about local village cats were particular favourites, and her rhymes show up quite a lot, too - perhaps unsurprising, given how fond we are of our felines. Even the briefest mention of these literary allusions is sure to raise a smile, and it’s always nice to have material that you know will land.
That got me thinking, while writing this week’s episode, about how powerful those prayer books must have been. The children’s books that punctuated my childhood are only foundational in my immediate family: my husband didn’t grow up with them, so instead of a knowing smile, when I say to him “I’m looking down, Pooh,” or “Scarface Claw, the Toughest Tom in Town” or “And one night, invaders came,” the best I can expect is raised brows. But the prayers and precepts and pericopes (isn’t that a delicious word?) that made up the prayer books and cards in Anne’s world would have been nearly universal for the ‘small fry’ of Avonlea. It must have been very comforting, very assuring, for every child in a generation to have the same touchstones - everyone would know the same songs, and rhymes, and hymns, and prayers, and references to those texts. Those books were also likely to have been foundational to the ‘big fry’ of Avonlea - the adults would likely have read similar tracts, and certainly would be reading and praying from the same versions of the Bible. This sort of cultural continuity is born out in the later installments of the Anne series: when Anne has moved to far-flung places (okay, other towns in PEI), she and all her new chums and bosom friends can quote at length, and do, not only religious texts, but also classical literature and poetry - and everyone gets the references. We can guess that Montgomery did this in her own life, because of the words she not only puts in her characters’ mouths, but on the frontispiece of the novel itself: she quotes a line from Robert Browning’s Evelyn Hope: “And the stars met in your aspect/made of fire and dew.” She must have assumed, probably rightly, that her readers would understand that reference and to what it alluded.
I admit that family in-jokes about Winnie the Pooh or The Old Ladies Who Liked Cats (a marvelous book, now sadly out of print) may not be as erudite as Browning or the Bible, but I think their functions are similar: just like Anne, and Montgomery, we have found words that delight us, and promptly borrow them wholesale for our own use. But they are also a connective tissue, reifying the links between Anne and her friends, or between my family, textual threads that bind us together.
Jennifer
Talking Shop
In this week’s episode, we spend some time talking about parlours and the often-rigid structures that surrounded social visits. But one of my biggest motivators for starting this audio series in the first place was quite a different kind of visiting. When I was away at school, my close friends lived within walking distance of me, and we regularly gathered, often on a kind of rota, at this house or that apartment, curled up on second-hand sofas with mis-matched mugs of tea clutched in our hands, to wile away our free hours talking. Sometimes the conversations were fluffy nonsense - clothes and the latest movie playing at the tiny independent theatre in town, horror stories from our assistant jobs and plans for summer holidays. But best of all were the nights when we lifted the shop-talk ban and let the conversation go where it willed. Sure, we still talked about saving up for a new pair of shoes, but headier subjects joined the mix - Marshall McLuhan, or the sculptures at Orsanmichele, or the British Library’s archives, or the overwhelm upon seeing that doryphoros: no, not that one, the other one.
For me, these late night tete-a-tete’s made my homesickness and the following week’s looming presentation shrink, if for only a few hours. At least in part, The Reader’s Museum is a way for me to recreate those earnest, eager late nights, surrounded by friends and brimming over with dreams, ambitions - hope. Grad school can be a challenging time, but it was also thrilling to find so many people, all in one place, who were just as keen as I was to think about the best way to install a Bauhaus weaving, or who exalted at the upcoming trip to the big city to see that travelling miniatures show. These were my kind of folks - they also went exclusively to museums when they travelled, and spent their time in a gallery at break-neck pace, trying to see just about everything in a collection, sprinting from the special exhibitions to this wing or to that hall and then back through those rooms to see that can’t-miss oil painting, taking a few moments to pay respects to that thing they studied once, with a quick stop off at the gift shop before it closed, an experience I affectionately call ‘the museum marathon.’
Were we insufferable? Of course, most grad students are. But we were also, I think, happy. I certainly was. We were sponges, soaking up as much knowledge and readings and experiences (and items for our CV) as we could squeeze in to what felt at that time like a never-ending parade of books and papers and grading and language credits and seminars and conferences and exhibitions and supervision meetings and deadlines and citations and archives, but was over in the blink of an eye. I miss those days, dear reader. And those late-night chat sessions, where we talked of ‘cabbages and kings’, seem to me like the glue that held it all together, the way we decompressed and prepared to dive back in, the pauses that punctuated what was otherwise a headlong rush towards what we were promised would be bright and shiny futures. In a later installment of the Anne series, one Captain Jim welcomes Anne and her friends by saying that ‘it won’t take long to spend an hour.’ In retrospect, didn’t take long for the years of grad school to slip by, either. So I’m glad for these episodes, and for the Reader’s Museum - in its imagined walls, I’m back on those lumpy sofas, tea in hand, setting the world to rights with my friends.
Jennifer
Pulling Back the Curtains
When I go on walks in the late afternoon, when my workday has come to an end and I am walking off the weight of the day, the windows in my neighbourhood are lighted as everyone around me arrives home after their workday, and settles in for the night. I keep my eyes peeled for dogs out on their evening walks, and smile at the fearless squirrels in the park, and glance at the windows, glowing yellow in the snapping air of winter. In the summertime, the windows are dark because everyone is out, enjoying the park or playing in the back lane or sitting out on their front porches, but in winter, the streets are empty, the houses are full, and the lights are on. I count the number of windows I see that have the same curtains I do in my windows. You know the ones - they’re white, translucent cotton, with vertical lines and little machine-embroidered dots by way of texture, and yes, they do come from the giant, flat-pack home goods store that rhymes with idea. Sometimes, the ubiquity of these curtains irks me. When I return home, I glare at the ones hanging in my windows, and wish I had something more interesting or unique. But then I remember that my best friend, who lives many thousands of miles away and who, if I’m lucky, I get to see once or twice a year, has those curtains, too.
The more I examine objects from the past, the more I keep coming back to two thoughts. The first is that humans have been spending most of our time trying to solve the same problems, again and again, in different ways and with varying levels of success. We’re trying to get enough good food, stay warm and look good, avoid bad weather, and bump along with each other - everything else is extra. But the second thought that usually follows this one is that there aren’t really solutions: just trade offs. My curtains are the same as everyone else’s, and come from a massive global corporation. I have no connection with the person who made them (or, more likely, the person running the machines that made them), or even the people who sell them. In exchange for that distance, though, I get a cheap product (in all senses of that word) that I can find just about anywhere in the world, and that, should the need arise, I can replace at a moment’s notice. And that availability means that lots of other people have them, too, which, in a way, connects me with people all over the world. They may not be especially good curtains, but their ubiquity - the very thing I sometimes find frustrating about them - is their selling point.
And there are lots of things like this - global soda brands that are basically the same everywhere, so universal and available that their branding is iconic and their absence more unusual than their presence. You could say the same thing about mass-printed books, with the same type face and number of pages and words in the same order. We readily accepted these products because they were, and are, cheap, available, and best of all, predictable. And they connect us - I smile a little at the person on the bus reading the same copy of a book as the one on my shelf, and there can be comfort in buying a familiar can of soda from a vending machine when we find ourselves far from home. But perhaps, as we flung our arms wide to embrace these products, we let go of other things - specificity, personal expression, local identity, skills, and the handmade. See what I mean? No solutions: just trade offs.
This afternoon, when I go out for my daily walk, I’ll think differently about those white curtains hanging in other people’s windows. Maybe I’ll think of my friend, or imagine some of the other homes where these curtains hang, and try to appreciate them for what they are. I think, though, that the feeling of having lost something, of having realised that loss too late, will be hard to shake.
Jennifer
Cold Feet
You know the little battle you have with yourself, about getting out of bed in winter? Getting up in the summer is a breeze - the sun is up, peeking through the curtains and practically singing you out of bed. It’s warm, but not too hot - a perfect time for a walk, to admire people’s gardens and see as many dogs out for their walks as possible. Plus, all this delight is happening at what would typically be an ungodly hour, so you have the rest of your day in front of you - what could be better? But, dear reader, we are not in the Merry Month of May - it is still January. I lay awake this morning, well before 6 am, dreading the impending alarm, and knowing in my heart of hearts that I would have to put my feet on the floor, where they would immediately freeze and stay frozen the rest of the day. I fought with myself - the upper part of my mind listing off the things I had to accomplish this morning, while the lower, reptilian part of my brain simply hissed ‘waaaarrrrrmmm’ and rolled over without another word. In just a few minutes, I will have to put on every piece of clothing I own and brave the frigid temperatures and the windchill, the snow blustering and the death rattle of the wind, which seems to blow directly in your face no matter which way you turn.
I was reminded this morning, though, of a section of the great Ruth Goodman’s How to Be A Victorian in which she extolls the virtues of mats or rugs, especially in the bedroom. (Also, if you haven’t read Goodman’s How to Be A Victorian or any of her other works, run, don’t walk - they are splendid. She is a social historian who spends months or years living in different periods of history, some of which are filmed and available online for FREE, dear reader, and much of which she has published in her many books. Also, she is hilarious. I promise this isn’t sponsored by Ruth Goodman: I’m just a fan.) Textiles of just about any sort were expensive, so even second-hand mats or rugs made from scraps, like Marilla's braided rugs, would have been out of reach for many people. But what a difference they make! As much as I whinge and moan about getting out of bed and feeling cold the rest of the day, I can (and should) be grateful for a rug by my bedside, and a heated home - no fires or potbelly stoves required! In a Victorian house, the presence or absence of a floor covering to mitigate the cold might have taken the chill out of the morning for those who got up before the fires were lit. All this to say that I am feeling the winter blues pretty intensely this morning, dear reader, but warmed slightly (very slightly) at the thought of my rug and knowing that, joy of joys, I will return to the warmth and comfort of my bed (complete with heavy blanket and purring cat) before too long.
Jennifer
Chocolate Caramels
My grandfather smoked his whole life. As a child, I found the smell of his tobacco unbearable, and my mother, on more than one occasion, had to hang my clothes and soft toys out in the bitter cold of January to get rid of the clinging, permeating odours of tobacco after a visit to his house. But, decades later, when hunting through a sagging stack of hand-me-down linens from his home, long after he had passed, I unexpectedly pulled out a handful of his handkerchiefs. That earthy, acrid perfume of lingering tobacco hit me in the face like a flat palm and staggered me - suddenly, I was a pre-schooler, skidding, sock-footed, on the polished floors of the hallway that bisected his house, coming in from climbing the craggy apple tree and leaving apples for the deer on his front step, watching the progress of my little yogurt cup boat in the creek that snaked through his backyard. There was chocolate milk on offer in his house, a special kind that I didn’t have at home, and if I think about it long enough, I can recall the way it tasted. It’s funny how smells and tastes seem to reach back farther into our memories than just about anything else, pulling us into times long since forgotten.
I suspect that the old-fashioned candies Anne raves about in this week’s chapter might have similar effects - pop one in your mouth and be transported to the carefree days of youth, recalling the sorts of candies that your great-aunt might put out in little cut-glass bowls (or is that just me?) Whether from nostalgia, or simply a taste for chocolatey, melt-in-your-mouth sweets, or both, people have loved and clamoured for chocolate candies - just like the ones about which Anne waxes poetic.
To that end, dear reader, let us turn our attention to recipes. On the 6th of March, 1881, the New York Times published the following recipe for chocolate caramels:
“Take of grated chocolate, milk, molasses, and sugar, each one cupful, and a piece of butter the size of an egg; boil until it will harden when dropped into cold water; add vanilla; put in a buttered pan, and before it cools mark off in square blocks. ”
I am here to warn you off, dear reader: this recipe produces a sort of incorrigible chocolate sludge, which cannot be corralled into the ‘square blocks’ as directed, because it refuses to harden. Besides, who measures butter in eggs? What is going on? Instead, I offer you a modern version, which is, admittedly, rather more like fudge - but still delicious. This recipe comes from the Anne of Green Gables cookbook by Kate Macdonald.
Ingredients:
1 c (240 g) unsalted butter, plus more for greasing
3 oz (85 g) semi-sweet chocolate
1 1/4 c (380 g) sweetened condensed milk
1/4 c (80 g) corn syrup
2 1/4 c (495) firmly packed brown sugar
Instructions:
Butter an 8 x 8 (20 cm x 20 cm) baking pan and set aside.
Put your butter, chocolate, sweetened condensed milk, corn syrup, and brown sugar in a large, heavy saucepan. Mix with a wooden spoon.
Place the saucepan over medium heat, bring the mixture to a boil, and let the chocolate melt completely.
Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook the mixture for 30 minutes. It should boil gently all the while, but not too vigorously. Stir the mixture constantly with the wooden spoon. The candy will burn easily if it is not mixed. Call it an arm workout, and focus on how delicious your candy will be when you’re done!
When it’s cooled, the candy will be very thick. Pour it into the baking pan and set it on a cooling rack.
Let the candy cool completely, about 1 1/2 hours, before cutting it into 3/4-inch (2 cm) squares. Put out a stacked plateful in the centre of your next knitting circle or quilting bee, and watch them disappear! Enjoy!
Jennifer
All Aboard
There is something so satisfying, comforting, invigorating, about taking the train. I didn’t realise this until well into adulthood, because train travel is pretty uncommon in the Prairies. These days, the trains you hear singing their haunting, echoing songs over the wheat fields or behind the slopes of sound hills are transporting grain, fuel, machinery, across the plains. Their rusting cars are branded with graffiti and stamped with the names and logos of old companies that used to mean prosperity and stability, and now speak only of a time long since past: CNR, CN, CPR.
But then I moved out east, where train travel is common, even commonplace. There are big cities and middle-sized towns and tiny villages clustered together, making train travel for people more logical, more economically viable. Because it was novel, the whole experience of taking the train was thrilling to me in a way that it very clearly wasn’t to the native-born Ontarians around me: I delighted in the charming little train stations, the clever folding down tray tables, the way the trains groaned and rattled as they gathered speed. I even liked queueing to board, my bag slung over one shoulder, and my ticket in the other hand, following the directions of grim-faced train attendants who pointed me to car three, to car four, who passed my heavy suitcase to me up the narrow stairs of the train car. But best of all, best by far, were those trips where I managed to book a window seat. The windows on the train were better than any book I had brought with me, better than listening to music, better even than imagining out a murder in car three, a la Agatha Christie, and solving it. Delicate green hills rolled passed, or blossoming orchards, or dark, foreboding stands of pine and birch, or trembling frosted bracken. Even passing through the barren grey industrial parks of the towns whose perimeters we skirted was fascinating. From those wide windows, I could catch glimpses of life - people’s backyards, littered with children’s toys or carefully tended gardens, dogs barking from behind chain link fences, the black loam of freshly turned fields, sagging dilapidated barns with sad, empty doorways and windows like eyes, crows dropping from their perches on telephone lines as the train passed, and glittering rivers with forgotten millwheels still turning steadfastly.
Of course, there are downsides - travel of just about any kind can be a faff. There was the time the train stopped on the tracks for hours because of a blizzard, the grim faces of the train attendants growing ever grimmer as the minutes ticked by and the passengers became more and more ticked off. There was something frightening, then, about looking out the window and seeing nothing but shivery white. Or the inevitable person who conducts a conversation on their phone, at full volume, announcing all their banking details and their health insurance number and their childhood dog’s name to the whole train car. Or the overpriced, half-frozen sandwiches. But on the whole, I think I prefer taking the train to just about any other method of long-distance travel. One can, after all, bring sandwiches from home, and the noisiest person in the car is a good candidate for victim number one in an imaginary murder mystery. I know I’m not alone in enjoying the train - I am joined by legions of train-spotters who delight in the details and minutiae of train schedules, machinery, tones, and stations. Perhaps they, like me, find something very satisfying in the mix of predicability and regiment of schedules and dates, arrivals and departures, timed to the minute, and the unknowable journey itself, which nearly always brings surprises. I don’t think it’s a mistake that so many stories take place on the train, or at least feature our intrepid main characters journeying from their old reality into the new via a train. Trains’ inexorable movement, fast but not too fast, comfortable but not quite home, and wide windows onto the world whipping past, makes for the perfect conveyer, setting, metaphor, and, for me, the best way to get from A to B. Safe journeys, then, to you, fellow travellers.
Jennifer
Note to self
I have one of those little magnetic notepads on my fridge, the kind where you write to-do lists and scrawl the groceries you want for the week. This week, mine included cinnamon tea (so good for the frigid days of January), white vinegar, hot sauce, and spinach. This pad is plain - just blank lines with no decoration. In the past, though, I have had grocery list pads with borders of flowers, a la William Morris, or festooned with cats, books, cartoon dogs, and Walter Gropius quotations. When I used those pads, I always managed to tuck my list into my pocket or purse on my way out the door. But the plain list, dear reader, I promptly left on the fridge, and came home instead with cat litter (necessary) and peppermint hot cocoa (distinctly unneccesary, but still welcome). When I returned, I looked in dismay at the innocent, forgotten list on the fridge, where it still remains. I shall try again next week to remember cinnamon tea, white vinegar, hot sauce, and spinach - although, based on past experience, my chances of remembering the list are not good.
This quotidian, if a little frustrating, episode, put me in mind of a distant memory. In an art theory class I took, many moons ago, our professor asked what appeared to be a simple question: what is writing for? It was one of those foreboding grey November days, far too early in the morning for such heady questions, the kind of morning wherein no one meets the professor’s eye and everyone is silently wondering if anyone actually made it all the way through the assigned Derrida reading - spoiler warning: no one had. His question was met with discomforted and unwilling silence. (Having done some teaching myself now, I know only too well the many and varied attempts students make to avoid the professor’s gaze, evidently believing what my cat believes: that if I cannot see you, you cannot see me.) Then, slowly, the usual list of undergrad answers trickled haltingly out: communication, expression, posterity. With some coaxing, we arrived at an interesting conundrum - do we write a grocery list for posterity? For expression?
“To remember things,” came a timid offering from somewhere in the second row.
"So you leave the list at home?” came the reply. No, we all agreed - the whole point of the list was to help you remember to buy oranges and baking powder, which it could not do if said list had been left forlornly on your kitchen table - or, in my case, still hanging on the fridge door.
What we came to, in the end, is that sometimes, writing something down allows it to completely leave your mind - writing is, sometimes, for forgetting. But, at least for me, the decoration on the border of my grocery list pad actually helps me to remember to…remember. In a similar way, the telegrams of this week’s episode are very obviously about communication - even when, as in chapter 1 of Anne of Green Gables, they do a poor job of sharing accurate or complete information. But they also became about expression, about decoration, about play. It didn’t take long for writers and poets of yesteryear to get comfortable, even creative, with telegram style, pushing on the limits of space and form to find exhilerating, challenging, or charming ways to write. Perhaps the most charming instance of this kind of play with form comes from Victor Hugo, who, when he wanted to inquire of his publisher how Les Miserables was faring, sent a telegram comprised only of ‘?’. In response, his publisher sent back the effusive but brief ‘!’
Or what about Dorothy Parker, who, in a fit of writer’s block, sent to her publisher:
"THIS IS INSTEAD OF TELEPHONING BECAUSE I CANT LOOK YOU IN THE VOICE. I SIMPLY CANNOT GET THAT THING DONE YET NEVER HAVE DONE SUCH HARD NIGHT AND DAY WORK NEVER HAVE SO WANTED ANYTHING TO BE GOOD AND ALL I HAVE IS A PILE OF PAPER COVERED WITH WRONG WORDS. CAN ONLY KEEP AT IT AND HOPE TO HEAVEN TO GET IT DONE. DONT KNOW WHY IT IS SO TERRIBLY DIFFICULT OR I SO TERRIBLY INCOMPETENT. DOROTHY"
Sing it, Dorothy.
So, just like my floral grocery list, telegrams moved beyond the practical, venturing into artistic expression and communicating those things that go beyond dates, facts, and figures - moving on, instead, to emotions, creativity, and invention. So, dear reader, I hope as you brave January’s chill, you find those eclamation-point-worthy moments to play, create, write - even if it is only a grocery list.
Jennifer
Beginning
I’m sitting in my office, with the window open in December (!), the traffic swooshing by outside, kicking up rain water and road salt. There are birds in the fir tree, twittering with what I interpret as aggressive optimism, despite, or perhaps because of, the grey skies. Probably, though, they are really just shouting at each other about territory - hey you, get off my branch, that sort of thing. Have you ever cleaned your house very, very thoroughly in a twisted attempt to avoid the thing you actually have to do? This is me doing that now - if I describe my morning to you, maybe I won’t have to face the task of finding some elegant, brilliant, witty way to introduce myself and this audio series. The cursed cursor is blinking, inexorably, reminding me just how blank my page is. Ask not for whom the cursor blinks - it blinks for thee!
Here we are, dear reader, at the beginning. I’m launching the first episode of my audio series, The Reader’s Museum, this week. In it, I’ll be considering objects from novels of yesteryear and today. When I had the idea for this series, the obvious first question was which book to choose for the maiden voyage, this our first of many visits to The Reader’s Museum - there are so many possibilities! But, in the end, it was actually quite an easy choice. The pandemic was a terrible time for so many reasons, the least of which being that I have a profound and unending loathing for the word ‘unprecedented.’ Doesn’t it make your skin crawl? My teeth itch just writing it. During that unprecedented period, (yuck), I tried to read new books, watch new shows, new movies - but nothing doing. Instead, the books that found their way nightly to my bedside table were old favourites, books I’d read again and again (and again) since childhood. They were comfort blankets with covers, offering certainty in a time when nothing seemed certain. No matter how many times I picked it up, Anne of Green Gables stayed the same - Anne’s hair was still distinctly red, Diana was the best of bosom friends, Gilbert Blythe was an absolute dishy dish, and chapter thirty-seven still made me weep like a child. So where else could I start but with these ink and paper companions who had bourne and buoyed me for so long?
The joy of this series, I hope, will be that unlike brick and mortar museums, wonderful as they are, this museum lives in the imagination. It can look and feel and sound however we choose. Are the objects housed at The Reader’s Museum beneath glass, on plinths, hanging on walls? Are they organised by time period, by material, by novel, by chapter? Is the museum itself an impressive, imposing work of architecture, a cozy nook that smells of second-hand books, an ever-expanding rabbit hole - or something entirely new? Only one way to find out! All this to say, dear reader, that the museum is officially open: the doors are swung wide, admission is free, and you are always welcome to join me as we move through books and centuries, people and places, here at The Reader’s Museum.
Jennifer