Tripping over Anne Carson, deliberating on comfort
Today I was searching for another interview and tripped over this Anne Carson interview on Writers and Company. I loved her book Nox. The tactile unfolding, fragments and collage and what it intended. During the interview she tells a story about a teacher who taught her Latin at lunch time in school, whom she subsequently learnt took off to a farm and became a hermit. It reminded me of the single or individual teachers in life who impact us and how important that impact can be. I particularly enjoyed her tale because it reminded me of a wonderful, eccentric French teacher I had, who was very encouraging and supportive of my desire to create odd, effusive sentences in a language I could barely mutter where’s the park, Jean-Paul is sitting by the side of a lake and can I have a raspberry ice-cream in. When it came to writing she would smile at my requests for vocabulary or attempts to add details and delight in them. Strangely in hindsight many of my vocabulary requests concerned the weather!
I must read more of Anne Carson’s work as I am only familiar with a small amount of it.
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I drank a cup of Lea Valley Tools tea today and it was very acceptable. The tin of tea was a present from a much loved friend several years ago and I’ve admired the tin, but never religiously engaged with its contents. That will change! It was a particular taste I was looking for and needed to cure a headache from today’s low clouds. And the green tin delivered. Later in the evening thinking maybe it could be a hint, I took up the tools catalogue for a bit of comfort reading.
I’ve been thinking a lot about comfort and how and where we go for it, or how and where it may be right there beside us. I think possibly because yesterday my partner’s brother gave me the most incredible food to eat that he had prepared and I was very taken by the near musical notes in its taste. Also, because our winter and spring have been strangely colder than usual we are still clutching blankets and putting on scarves, which brings me again to the consolation of comfort.
Low-pressure unison
There is another low-pressure system coming in that’s provoking yet another curious weather situation. Today, late in the day, wind, cold freezing wind with a snowfall warning. It looks like the snow will be slush but the combination of wind and nearly snow coldness was unusual for us.
The clouds hung low in that pre-snow mentality they possess.
The weather redolent of a shift and around us the talk is of a teachers strike and this morning’s news of the death of Jim Green, (RIP), a long-term poverty activist and former City Councillor was written all over those sad, low clouds today. A strange unison between weather and change and sadness out there.
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A unity that failed to occur today however was the chicken soup I decided to make (Asian style) before the misguided notion overtook me to hurl four lamb sausages into it. I am still several hours later wondering what possessed me to do such a thing.
Answers on a post-card to ….
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A major woodwork undertaking that should not have been undertaken but God loves an ambitious palm-sanding woman, with her dressmaking measuring tape and her dremmel. An extraordinary sized shelf has resulted. I think a very spacious, high-class shoe rack is the outcome, which needs to have a back to stabilize itself. My first experiment with mad-sized lumps of plywood from scratch. It looks better than it touches. It touches, well, wobbly. Lesson learned= measure the space into which the intended shelf will dwell.
It sounds like snow.
There’s a sound with snow even before it begins.
Muffled.
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Probably our most significant weather event of the season has passed me by unnoticed because I have been so consumed with my book and work. A sorry forecaster indeed.
The other day a woman gave me impending news of the weather and the cold drop. Unheard of! I am always ahead on the weather. Except I’m not. Now I am officially behind.
But I have managed to triumph in the area of cooking omelettes. Thanks to Jamie Oliver’s how to cook an omelette section and amid a chorus of cynicism from the small male, who has finally, 3 successful omelettes later, conceded it’s a triumph.
Alas he’s requesting I cook omelettes at completely unGodly hours.
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My wrists aren’t doing what God intended them to do (or what I want them to do)
The weather is not doing what I forecasted it would do two weeks ago
It’s a limp Wednesday indeed.
My brain aches every time I attempt the continental knitting, but when you are knitting a jumper for a good man it knits beautifully.
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Next Weds promised chilly spell may be a bust! The figures are being revised upwards! I still have my eye on the 16th -20th for an arctic blast.
There was a smidgen of sleety rain (flakes size of pin pricks) briefly last night. I caught sight of them in the headlights of a Honda. The forecast became fog overnight. We’ve been stuck at 3 degrees, a bit like something that fails to cook inside the low oven temperature.
A non-budging weather event noted.
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Yesterday I gave up on the Irish budget. The sight of Michael Noonan nodding it out sent me fleeing to Denis Donoghue.
Each day I go to slow-cooking battle with Denis and it’s very satisfying. Yesterday we were hand wrestling over the imagination. I was with him, but do wonder Denis — what about what’s absent in literature? What about what’s missing? And what about the readers who go looking for what’s missing and wonder about it? Where are you on appetite and the unmet appetite say?
Battling Denis
Early morning with Denis Donoghue’s bewk. I don’t entirely agree with him, (I’m more partial to social history than Denis maybe) but admire his questioning and hungry, battling through the nettles rather than admiring the swans, mind. Rather a joy at 5am with the current cold, sunny spell out the window.
The small male is a very early riser these days. This morning he remarked of our neighbours across the street “Spotted… two more insomniacs, one making breakfast.”
My forecast was wrong! It’s 8 degrees and pouring rain since this morning! I have figured out why. The problem is I am forecasting indoors in a building which is approx 4 degrees colder at any given time then what is happening outside.
Therefore the -4 weather event, felt to be -8 outside, was felt to be at least -12 in here therefore it is very hard to see how the temperature could rise so rapidly. I have to factor this in. We have this crazed tradition of fans blowing constantly in our hallways. I recently asked our manager why this must be so (each year I have a lengthy exchange in winter with the organization who run our building about why we must live in a freezer .. they acknowledge it and refuse to turn the fans off because of a myriad of rotating reasons). The most recent explanation given was the sump pump was broken (that’s sewerage) and there was problems getting a replacement, therefore the fans had to be blowing all the time because the smell is so terrible.
Point taken, says I and added another scarf to my layers.
I love our building though. There are ups, downs and inbetweens and a certain honesty that comes with it. I am very, very fortunate to have housing.
A wind event is now picking up outside. Today is what my mother would describe as ‘dirty’ weather.
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I summited the second row of the V neck jumper, despite two males and two guinea pigs distracting me. It’s a lovely rusty colour. But it is proving so difficult. I taught a friend to knit on Saturday evening, she told me her mother could knit all kinds of cable-knit jumpers. She picked it up in no time and her stitches were so perfectly even. Knitting DNA! To watch as someone’s brain and in turn hands process the directions is fascinating because people are so different in the way they pick things up. We have left-handed people and ambidextrous people in our family so our learning styles are often very different.
What a rare old weather day … sun with bluster that became bluster with eye assault… which dipped to cold to colder and foggy cold was the final note. The most distinctive bout of fog so far this Autumn/winter season which my son insisted was not fog at all but gunpowder.
A very Sherlock Holmes finish to Halloween evening. I lacked my usual stamina for traipsing door to door and did a short bit with the family and left to knit with Lori, while the boyos and Grandma carried on.
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This afternoon at the prostate clinic I was reassured to see a couple of other young women, an old man with pigtails (not a Halloween costume) until finally a poor fella was rolled up on a bed with only a quarter of an oxygen tank remaining. I offered that he should go ahead of me and then worried the entire appointment about his oxygen tank expiring while the Dr. talked to me because somehow he didn’t jump the queue as I hoped he might. Due to this excessive worrying I now have a sheet of paper for some kind of test and have no idea what it’s for, so will take it to the lab for some translating.
Urologic Science reminds me so much of St Pancreas train station in London. I think you’d have to have been there to understand the connection. But the strident looking trains getting set to depart to the North remind me off the patients who exit from their appointments with good news, the handshake from the Dr and six-month-to one-yearly check up appointment. They skip out of there. Perhaps it was a good clinic today, since multiple skippers exited. But there’s the returns and the one-way tickets in there also. Co-incidentally I saw a man out on the street before I went in who had the look of Jack Layton about him and I had a bit of a Jack moment remenbering that it still seems astonishing that he’s dead and not say, leaning on a cane or climbing stairs in Ottawa.
I am lucky as they seem to have figured out my problem. The care is excellent in that clinic. (They also use Macs..) Canadian Health Care at its best. I won’t have a bad word said against our health care system.
I think this may be our most middling Autumnal day. The leaves are droopy with despair.
They remain on the turn. They’re at the halfway point now so you can look at a long line of them and see the beginning, middle, and end of the leaves colour changes. I had never noticed before how the timing can differ between them.