The urban jungle in winter

To stop and smell the roses in January in Montreal is to take a half-hour to walk the half-block from school to home.

For a 6-year-old, it is to mark every patch of virgin snow, to climb every snow-blown mountain at the end of every driveway and slide down it or, failing that, attempt to demolish it.

For the 6-year-old's mother, it is to lose patience at first, then watch and indulge, even help. What's the hurry? To get home, have supper, go to bed? It is to remember the magic of the snow of childhood.

Sharpening my wings

Some days, I walk into bookstores and I buy things — books! On impulse! Just like that! Some days, I don't know why I do it. But some days, it makes me feel better.

One day — in fact, I believe it may have been my birthday — my eyes fell on a thick black stack of The Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert. Besotted by Poetry though I may be these days, and curious to better know my countrymen (if I may call them that; I think I may), and realizing that likely it's freshly out in paperback, and printed with a fake sticker, the New York Times calling it a notable book, I still thought it was weird that the bookstore should have more than a dozen copies in stock. No matter. I had to have one. It was my birthday after all.

The book sits on the shelf under the coffee table, intimidating me. It is Poetry, and quite possibly Important besides, but also the fact of its Polishness sets me on edge a little — I worry that what I find will be too little, or too much.

Some days I pick it up, open it at random. I'm sniffing it out, getting used to its presence.

Today I find this...

Look

The cold blue sky like a stone on which angels
sublime and quite unearthly sharpen their wings
moving on rungs of radiance on crags of shadow
they gradually sink into the imaginary heaven
but in another moment they emerge even paler
on the other side of the sky the other side of the eye
Don't say that it's not true that there are no angels
you immersed in the pool of your indolent body
you who see everything in the color of your eyes
and stand sated with world — at your lashes' edge

How could anyone be sated, with world, with poetry, with the sublime?

The story so far

I've been reading. I've been lost in my reading — in good ways and in bad.

It started with The Savage Detectives. I started it over the Christmas break, and it was my little oasis of poetry, to shut the world off — the family, the noise — for a few minutes a day and immerse myself in a book.

So I loved the start of it, wanted to know more of the visceral realist movement in Mexico. Then it got weird. The second section of the book, called "The Savage Detectives," consists of the journal entries of a varied cross-section of people, recalling certain events, or nonevents, in which the new visceral realists we'd come to know in the first section played peripheral roles. Then I felt lost. I was somewhat startled to find myself dislocated in space and time, over and over again. (Who are the detectives here anyway? And what's so savage about them?) Then I gave myself over to it.

But the whole time I'm thinking: How did someone manage to craft a novel out of all this? Is it really a novel? And do I really like it?

These tiny windows onto these poets who passed through random people's lives. This interests me, as a technique, as well as in life, because, well, how much do we know anyone really? The size of the window varies, but even to live with someone for years, sharing nights and days, whole and endless, is there ever complete entry into their inner life?

This, then, is how one writes? Find a window, open it wider, wider. And when it doesn't open any further, find another window?

"One day I drank five Coca-Colas and suddenly I felt sick, as if the sun had filtered down into my Cokes and I'd drunk it without realizing." This is a magical sentence. I've read it over countless times. I still don't get it. Sick — like the sun would poison your drink; drinking the sun would poison you. And that doesn't seem quite right, it's not the glass of Florida sunshine we down at breakfast. But then it's not the Florida sun, is it? And I remember seeing the desert shimmer in the south of Tunisia, the sad little zoo with the trick camel that drank water from a Coke bottle; I remember The Sheltering Sky and I remember Under the Volcano, and pretty much the only thing I remember about the both of them is the feeling of heat, the exhaustion of it, like drinking a poison sun. It's a plain little sentence, but I love it.

Excerpts:
Stars like holographic projections
Two islands

Then I started the seahorse book (so called by Helena for the illustration on its cover): Lighthousekeeping, by Jeanette Winterson. I started by loving it. So much the opposite of Bolaño, so spare; poetic with a delicate poignancy of observation. Not Bolaño's rapturous flood of images and emotions.

Bolaño is the poetry of excess. Winterson is a negative; it's what's left after all excess is removed. I don't know how to substantiate this. It's a feeling. Visceral. There is a time for Winterson's stillness. And I needed to be stilled, a little, in my reading. But I get a rush from the bombardment Bolaño levels at me. Makes me feel alive. Winterson leaves me feeling longing, empty. Bolaño may tear out my innards, but at least I see the innards, know what and where they are, as I gather it all up into myself again. It's something visceral.

Lighthousekeeping starts in a fairytale haze, through which eternal truths seem to shine. How does she write this thing? Few words, but all, I'm sure, carefully chosen.

Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.

Pew did not speak. I didn't know if he was kind or unkind, or what he intended to do with me. He had lived alone all his life.

That first night, Pew cooked the sausage in darkness. No, Pew cooked the sausage with darkness. It was the kind of dark you can taste. That's what we ate: sausages and darkness.

And there was talk of story, without all that much story actually being divulged. Wherever a story starts, one could always go back a little further, to an earlier beginning, just as stories always go on well after the ending. How can you tell a story these days without acknowledging this? And it all made a calm and rational sense to me.

Then it got weird. Suddenly the fairy tale was gone and we were in modern times trying to make it sound like a fairy tale, all cryptic proclamations of love, all airy-fairy. And she lost me.

But all the same, I wonder. How did she write this, these disparate tableaux laid on top of each other to make something called a novel?

I noted an obvious debt to Doris Lessing:

The doctor leaned back in his chair. "Do you keep a diary?"

"I have a collection of silver notebooks."

"Are they consistent?"

"Yes. I buy them from the same department store."

"I mean, do you keep on record or your life, or several? Do you feel you have more than one life perhaps?"

"Of course I do. It would be impossible to tell one single story."

"Perhaps you should try."

"A beginning, a middle, and an end?"

"Something like that — yes."

Then something more visceral (though, somehow, fairly emotionlessly told):

My heart is a muscle with four valves. It beats 101,000 times a day, it pumps eight pints of blood around my body. Science can bypass it, but I can't. I say I give it to you, but I never do.

...reminding me of "How I Finally Lost My Heart."

Then I read more Doris Lessing: On Cats. It's light, and deft, and it's about cats, wonderful cats! This is not a fluffy, sentimental book. This is about weird creatures with secret lives. And I wonder how she does it, there's no particular way about her, or her words; it's all done without pretension, straight up. She just has the most interesting things to say.

Now, at the end of January, in the deep of winter, I am reading The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield, and I wish I could stay in bed all day reading. I've been suspicious of this book; overhyped, I thought. But on impulse I dragged it out of the bargain bin the other day, and I haven't been able to put it down since. It feels old-fashioned (and I don't know what that means); traditional: extolling the beginning-middle-end that Winterson denies. It is comfortable, if slightly (deliciously) eery, and makes me want to stay still and lost and blanketed till it's done.

And this is how I'm learning to write. Reading has always been a window onto another world, but now I'm seeing that writing is too. I see so many windows these days — in the metro, in my coworkers' phone conversations, in other internet lives. Some days there is even time enough to peer through them. It's not a matter of escape, but simply of seeing something else, something outside myself. (If I've learned anything this last year it's to allow myself to be lifted out of myself, to be lifted, to lift myself.) To shape a novel is to find where the views through various windows intersect.

After a certain age

[...] Anyway, somewhere back there, a very small girl had fought for and won a cat who kept her days and nights company; and then she lost it.

After a certain age — and for some of us that can be very young — there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before, they appeared before, masked differently, wearing different clothes, another nationality, another colour; but the same, the same, and everything is an echo and a repetition; and there is no grief even that it is not a recurrence of something long out of memory that expresses itself in unbelievable anguish, days of tears, loneliness, knowledge of betrayal and all for a small, thin, dying cat.

— from On Cats, by Doris Lessing.

While my back is turned

Ham, anyone?

My fable

< You can't sleep right now. Continue? >

I came to bed late last night. J-F brings me a coffee this morning, and I try to talk out my predicament.

"I'm having trouble with my character — she can't sleep. She won't get into bed, let alone have sex. I think it may be potion-related — you know how many of them are java-based..."

J-F looks at me in disbelief. "Do you have any idea how much you sound like a teenage geekboy?"

I stayed up way past my bedtime playing a videogame.

For Helena's sake, of course. Watching her father play Fable II, well... she wanted to play too. When J-F started to worry that she'd undo his progress, I agreed to coach her through her own game. Better: we've created our own kickass girl hero.

We have an arrangement: she kills all the bad guys and I take care of all the administrative affairs, as well as kill off those bad guys that are either too tough or too scary.

We play nice, generally: work hard, follow the rules, love presents (giving and receiving), don't steal, dance for the crowd, treat the dog right. We make decisions, set priorities, consider strategies. We explore.

I watch her kill 100 hollow men; she ignores me rambling on about TS Eliot, despite the fascinating Doctor Who connection.

At the end of the day, there is business to settle: an inventory of treasures to manage, skills and weapons to upgrade, rents to adjust, relationships to maintain.

I want to keep our game-family provided for and happy. Having been away on a quest, it seems only right to spend some quality time together before embarking on another.

But I can't get my game-husband in bed with me.

I've tried everything. I buy a new outfit, dye my hair. My game-husband says he wants me, as do many villagers. But my character will not go to bed. This bed is worn and has a suspect history; so I buy a new bed. My game-husband asks, "Are you sure this is your bed?" I put the old bed back. I try a few pick-up lines; he suggests we go "that way." I can't be quite sure what that way lies, but it's quite certain he will not lay with me. "That way," in the direction he indicates, I buy a new house, a fresh marital home. But my old problem follows us.

I give up. I decide I may as well get some rest, restore my health. My attempt to do so gives me a message: < You can't sleep right now. Continue. >

Well, I can't sleep now.

Canada writes

We all know Canada's been reading for years; now Canada writes as well.

This week Canada writes about your favourite song. I've already answered; what's yours?

Sublime things (this week)

The moon! Did you see the moon!?!

Helena offers to show me the yoga positions she knows. She assembles herself into a lotus, palms together, lowers her eyes, and sweetly murmurs, "Namaste."

Beethoven!

J-F, as we're trying to plan the coming week, comments that Helena, busy with a toy, is too much in the present to want to participate in this conversation. She asks why we would say that, "Je ne suis pas dans une boîte."

The other night we watched The Man From Earth. While some of it (the acting, the camera work) is laughable, the ideas are persistently interesting. A departing scholar reveals to his colleagues that he is a Cro-Magnon caveman, 14,000 years old. He reveals that he studied with Buddha, and it later comes to light that he himself was a significant religious figure — Jesus. I love stories that work like this, showing great events as banalities — we see how the everyday grows into historical significance, given the right filters. See this movie if you want something to talk about for days.

I'm reminded of one of my very favourite films of all time (Man Facing Southeast), mostly, I guess, because the premise is beyond credibility — our protagonists' confessions must be taken on faith — but also because, when words run out, they turn to Beethoven. (I wonder what ever happened to David?)

Helena thinks the cat, knowing she wants to pet him, can "read her head."

Reading. Reading Bolaño, not sure what to make of this Bolaño, almost finished this Bolaño, need to take a break from Bolaño. Lining up: Lessing, Winterson, Turgenev. Also reading TS Eliot:

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Hurrah for Dumas!

Really. Dumas is wonderful. And great in bed.

I did finally finish The Last Cavalier late last year.

The first couple hundred pages moved swiftly, full of Napoleonic politics I couldn't always follow, but intensely gripping nonetheless. So much was I glutted, and confused, I had to take a break for a few weeks.

I hesitated to pick it up again — Dumas had exhausted me — but I did. To this point, the last cavalier, Count de Saint-Hermine, was a figure in the shadows as a Royalist and a potential threat to Napoleon, and about to marry into his circle, but circumstance whisked him away and he was left to languish in prison for a few years. On page 348, he is finally released, and with part 2, the adventure really begins.

Pirates, tigers, pythons, sharks. A girl who dies of love for him. Three hundred pages of completely unbelievable wild exploits. Dumas kept me up late; I rose sleepily cranky, dying to know what happens next.

I have 2 gripes:

1. The English translation is in desperate need of proofreading. I usually manage to turn off this part of my brain when reading for pleasure; it's rare that a typo pulls me out the fictional world I'm immersed in. Here I counted dozens of errors, and the magic of the story surely kept as many more from being noticed. A shame, for a manuscript whose publication is being marketed as important.

2. All who set out on this reading know the novel was "unfinished," that it might be in need of some editing, of tightening, of tying up loose ends. The volume is published with an appendix containing 3 chapters written by Dumas that don't directly follow from where the serial breaks off. That's fine; that's what happens when you die before you're finished. However, editor Claude Schopp took it upon himself to supply a conclusion to the episode that left us hanging. Scholar though he may be, familiar with all Dumas's phrasings and likely able to map all his plot developments and provide a very educated guess about where they might lead (besides being in possession of Dumas's notes), I think his 9-page addition was neither necessary nor right.

But. Great book. Delightful.

The characters in their exploits sometimes approach caricature. Their moral dimensions are at times simplistic, but there is no action taken devoid of one. Ultimately there's such fullness in Dumas's people, such joie de vivre in the telling, there is de la vie in what's told.

One thing that struck me. Dumas's character descriptions — of our beloved Count, but also of Napoleon, of Nelson, of advisors and friends — very often include a reference to age, expressing an awe that someone could accomplish so much, live so many adventures, command such respect and responsibility at so young an age. All so young! I notice, maybe, because I am becoming somewhat age-sensitive, marvelling at what others achieve by age 25 or 30. I suppose it's only natural old-man Dumas might obsess over such details, suprisingly only because he himself produced so much in his lifetime.

Some introductory comments.
Excerpt.

The form happiness takes

Today I bought pink, jewel-encrusted shoes. (For my daughter.)

Yesterday, we went to Narnia together. (Here's how.)

Two islands

Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.

— from The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño.

The most wonderful time of the year

It is. I keep reminding myself. Was. Has been. Wonderful.

I fully believed it a month ago, when the world first lay white at our feet, crowds bustled, and the air positively glistened with crisp anticipation. Then. Then came the mocking commentary: "It's the most wonderful time of the year," he'd singsong in a phony voice, eyebrow raised in irony. Mocking the good intentions, hardening the reality, hardening the icy crust around my heart.

And I started to hate bits of it. Obligations. Inanities.

I baked. With joy at first. I baked for escape at times. But mostly it was joy.

Now it's (almost) all over (we take the train home tomorrow) and I feel sad. I'm not sure why. Sigh.

I pass Helena a box of tissues. "I need just one Kleeneck, Mommy."

We travelled, ate, and drank. We played cards. I've read very little (after loving Dumas all through December, Bolaño bores me), written less, neglected friends.

I don't make resolutions. Never have. At least not the first-of-January kind. They are the early spring and the midsummer kind, the anyday resolution, to change, to shake things up, to just do something.

Except this year. I resolve to write. Daily. Not here necessarily. I mean, to write — for it to be shaped into something bigger. For some reason, even this makes me sad.

Stars like holographic projections

That same day I saw him again. I spent all afternoon talking to Maria and then we went downtown to buy a scarf, I think, and we kept talking (first about Cesar & Laura, then about everything in existence) and we ended up having cappuccinos at Café Quito, where Maria was supposed to meet Anibal. And Arturo showed up around nine. This time he was with a seventeen-year-old Chilean called Felipe Muller, his best friend, a tall blond kid who almost never spoke and followed Arturo everywhere. And they sat down with us, of course. And then other poets turned up, poets a little older than Arturo, none of them visceral realists, among other reasons because visceral realism didn't exist yet, poets like Anibal who had been friends with Arturo before he left for Chile and so had known him since he was seventeen. They were actually journalists and government officials, the kind of sad people who never leave downtown, or certain downtown neighborhoods, sovereigns of sadness in the area bounded by Avenida Chapultepec, to the south, and Reforma, to the north, staffers at El Nacional, proofreaders at the Excelsior, pencil pushers at the Secretaria de Gobernacion who headed to Bucareli when they left work and sent out their tentacles or their little green slips. And even though, as I say, they were sad, that night we laughed a lot. In fact we never stopped laughing. And then we went walking to the bus stop, Maria, Anibal, Felipe Muller, Gonzalo Muller (Felipe's brother who was leaving Mexico soon), Arturo, and I. And somehow all of us felt incredibly happy, I had forgotten all about Cesar, Maria was looking up at the stars that had miraculously appeared in the sky of Mexico City like holographic projections, and even the way we were walking was graceful, our progress incredibly slow, as if we were advancing and retreating to put off the moment at which we would inevitably have to reach the bus stop, all of us walking and looking up at the sky (Maria was naming the stars). Much later Arturo told me that he hadn't been looking at the stars but at the lights in some apartments on Calle Versalles or Lucerna or Calle Londres, and that was the moment he realized nothing would make him happier than being with me in on of those apartments, eating a few sandwiches with sour cream from a certain street stall on Bucareli. But he didn't tell me that at the time (I would've thought he was crazy). He told me that he'd like to read some of my poems, he told me that he loved the stars of both hemispheres, north and south, and he asked me for my number.

— from The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño.

Watch your toes!

Behold the unholy Santy Claws and the TOE-nenbaum!

All profits from the sale of this book will go to the Make-A-Wish Foundation® in Canada and a major national children's charity in the United States.

It's not too late to help.

The idea of pilgrimage

All the witches were asleep on the grass, and so were Will and Lyra. But surrounding the two children were a dozen or more angels, gazing down at them.

And then Serafina understood something for which the witches had no word: it was the idea of pilgrimage. She understood why these beings would wait for thousands of years and travel vast distances in order to be close to something important, and how they would feel differently for the rest of time, having been briefly in its presence. That was how these creatures looked now, these beautiful pilgrims of rarefied light, standing around the girl with the dirty face and the tartan skirt and the boy with the wounded hand who was frowning in his sleep.

There was a stir at Lyra's neck. Pantalaimon, a snow-white ermine, opened his black eyes sleepily and gazed around unafraid. Later, Lyra would remember it as a dream. Pantalaimon seemed to accept the attention as Lyra's due, and presently he curled up again and closed his eyes.

Finally one of the creatures spread his wings wide. The others, as close as they were, did so too, and their wings interpenetrated with no resistance, sweeping through one another like light through light, until there was a circle of radiance around the sleepers on the grass.

Then the watchers took to the air, one after another, rising like flames into the sky and increasing in size as they did so, until they were immense; but already they were far away, moving like shooting stars toward the north.

Serafina and Ruta Skadi sprang to their pine branches and followed them upward, but they were left far behind.

"Were they like the creatures you saw, Ruta Skadi?" said Serafina as they slowed down in the middle airs, watching the bright flames diminish toward the horizon.

"Bigger, I think, but the same kind. They have no flesh, did you see that? All they are is light. Their senses must be so different from ours. . . . Serafina Pekkala, I'm leaving you now, to call all the witches of our north together. When we meet again, it will be wartime. Go well, my dear. . ."

They embraced in midair, and Ruta Skadi turned and sped southward.

Serafina watched her go, and then turned to see the last of the gleaming angels disappear far away. She felt nothing but compassion for those great watchers. How much they must miss, never to feel the earth beneath their feet, or the wind in their hair, or the tingle of starlight on their bare skin! And she snapped a little twig off the pine branch she flew with, and sniffed the sharp resin smell with greedy pleasure, before flying slowly down to join the sleepers on the grass.

— from The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman.

This is the sequel to The Golden Compass, which I read last spring. I am enjoying it more than I did the first book, but as the story evolves I am recognizing the subtle beauty contained in that first book. In some ways, my head was too full for it at the time of first reading — I'd chosen to read it as a light and entertaining escape, when it is much more.

So here I am, nearing the close of the second; my jaw drops, tears well up, a shiver down my spine, a nod of affirmation. So many little snippets I thought I should share, full of wisdom, poignancy, truth. And then the above excerpt stops my heart in its tracks.

These are not God's angels, though this is a story of God, kind of. These are Rilkean angels, as realized by Wim Wenders. They are guides, muses, empaths. They know everything, but nothing.

You've been hanging around since I got here. I wish I could see your face...just look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here. Just to touch something! Here, that's cold! That feels good! Here, to smoke, have coffee. And if you do it together it's fantastic. Or to draw: you know, you take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line and together it's a good line. Or when your hands are cold, you rub them together, you see, that's good, that feels good! There's so many good things! But you're not here — I'm here. I wish you were here. I wish you could talk to me. 'Cause I'm a friend. Compañero!

This is what it is to be human, to be of the earth.

I wonder about Catherin, who used her ticket stub for a bookmark while reading this library book. Catherin took the bus from North Bay, with a change in Ottawa, to read about a subtle knife in Montreal. I hope she's well.

Cooking with Isabella

...and with Helena. And with pomegranate.

Recently someone asked me if I can cook, and spontaneously I answered, "Yes, of course!" implying that I did so very well.

The truth is: my reply was out of character. And it weighed on me.

Ordinarily, I would say, no, I'm not much of a cook. Pressed, and with a realistic and honest assessment, I would admit to being a fully competent cook.

But in that brief exchange, either I was, for some subconscious reason unknown to myself, fleetingly and wishfully adopting the persona of a "good cook," or perhaps I was letting an unprocessed inner truth escape.

For in truth, I cook a lot; I cook better than many people I know; and the more experienced I've become, the more cooking excites me.

I can't tell you how thrilled I was to have a copy of Nigella Christmas land on my doorstep. Thrilled!

I'm not really good with cookbooks. (I love them though. I don't have very many, but maybe I should.) That is, I'm not good at following a recipe. Maybe because so much of my working life is governed by rules, creating rules, making sure others abide by the rules, I feel I should be allowed liberty in my kitchen. Really, such freedom should be reserved for cooks who know what they're doing, but I'll take it anyway.

I'm always missing an ingredient. There's never thyme on hand, or whole mustard seed. Maybe my kitchen's not properly stocked. And most days of the week, I'm not organized enough to plan a meal and shop for it in advance.

Then there's the measuring. Maybe I don't have enough gadgets (where would I put them?). Sometimes the measuring cup is in the dishwasher, and I don't feel like washing it, so I eyeball quantities, using whatever receptacle is handy.

(This is normal, isn't it? This is what it is to cook, to have to cook daily, to not be gifted at it, to not have hours to devote to it, but to be competent. This is my culinary truth!)

Anyway. Nigella Christmas. Gorgeous book. Makes me hungry. Makes me want to cook. Makes me want to try to cook better.

The first thing I notice: this year's Christmas culinary trend appears to be pomegranate. If you want to make it festive, just add pomegranate! Holiday drinks? with pomegranate juice, of course! garnished with pomegranate seeds! Salads, for Christmas, should be red: cherry tomatoes, red peppers, red onion, pomegranate seeds! Stuffing, with pomegranate. Tired of turkey? — have some couscous, made festive with pomegranate.

I happen to love pomegranate. So this is all very exciting and inspiring. I am now fully deluded into thinking I can create exotic meals by adding a simple pomegranate flourish. (Sometimes my ambition exceeds my capability. My pomegranate lemon chicken was more than edible, but it looked pretty weird — splotchy.)

Still, I'm planning on following a number of recipes, as closely I can, this holiday season. There will be red salad. And there will be a sampling of Nigella's cocktails.

(One of the most important ingredients to have on hand while cooking is alcohol. Primarily for the cook. Also for the guests. I find this goes a long way to making a meal a success.)

While the book has inspired me to add pomegranate to just about everything lately, I've tried following only one recipe in earnest: Cookies! (Without pomegranate.)

This weekend, Helena and I made cookies. Scores of cookies. Two kinds (Nigella's, and perhaps more importantly, the cookies I made with my mom when I was a little girl). I even planned, to the extent of buying new cookie cutters (I'm finally beyond using plastic play-doh shape cutters) and setting aside enough time. As I'd predicted, the project that would take a reasonably organized and motivated adult about an hour or two when you add a very interested and helpful 6-year-old to the mix becomes a very messy day-long event. But, oh, was it fun!

Nigella's cookies, festooning the inside cover of her book:


My cookies, of which I'm unreasonably proud:


And they're tasty, too!

I had some trouble with the recipe: All the quantities are in weights; I'm used to measuring by the cup, as, I'm fairly certain, most average, non-serious cooks are. The recipe in the book doesn't say anything about mixing the butter and sugar together first (as the recipe at the link does, and which I think is a sensible thing to do). I don't own a food processor; I have a hand mixer; and I don't know what the difference is in the results they produce. I have no idea how soft dark sugar is different from any other kind of brown sugar. I've never heard of royal icing, so I looked it up on the internet, and kind of had to wing it (a bit too runny in the end).

(Then there's the decorating. Do Nigella's cookies look as if they were iced with a teaspoon, as she directs? Mine were.)

So the cookies aren't perfect. But they're pretty good! They have pepper in them! And they're pretty to look at. And they'll be even better next year.

Eat your heart out, Nigella! This year I feel like a domestic goddess!

Bolano's dogs

On the whole, I'm starting to get poetry. I had a breakthrough this year, I thought.

For a year and a half now, I've been smitten with Roberto Bolano's words, the poetry (the poeticism?) of his work. So I was very much looking forward to The Romantic Dogs.

But these poems had nothing of the transportative quality of his prose, the sweep-you-off-your-feet torrent of words, the passion for poetry, politics, life.

I recognize some of the characters in these poems from the stories and novellas I've read. I have the feeling that's where these poems started, built from the scraps that were edited out.

Now I'm left wondering if maybe it's Spanish-language poetry I don't quite get. (But I like Neruda.) I found too many similarities between these poems and those that constituted a chorus in Fuentes' Happy Families. Weirdly and unnecessarily cryptic. Like a private joke I have no hope of ever being in on.

Or maybe it's just not any good.

I did like, enjoy, appreciate some of it. "Godzilla in Mexico," for example.

And from "X-rays":

If we look, however, with X-rays inside of the man,
We'll see bones and shadows: ghosts of fiestas
and landscapes in motion as if viewed from an airplane
tailspin. We'll see the eyes he saw, the lips
his fingers brushed, a body emerged
from a snowstorm. And we'll see the naked body,
just as he saw it, and the eyes and the lips he brushed,
and we'll know that there's no cure.

Beautiful and provocative, no?

I'll be reading more Bolano soon, and counting on the prose to carry me further than did these poems.

Extra credit
Which of the following covers is the better design?

The stuff of my wintry days

Last week I woke up in a riding that holds the distinction of having elected to provincial parliament a member of Québec solidaire. I live among separatists, but communist separatists.

Helena starts using the cat voice, to put words in his mouth. The cat's words, though, are always few, mostly to do with the too-low level of his food bowl, or some invasion of his personal space.

The cat starts trying her bedroom first in the morning, finding her an easier target, more susceptible to his supersonic purring, the nibbling of extremities and the knocking-stuff-off-shelves ploy that over a dozen years I've become relatively immune to.

After I hennaed my hair, Helena conducts an examination and exclaims that I have two colours now: brun normale et brun "flash" (which, no, is not an established expression for describing hair effects, but I quite like it).

I read a few hundred pages of Dumas last weekend. I'm now at chapter 103? 104? Only about a hundred more pages to go!

I attended for the first time a parent-teacher meeting of which I was not the subject. I learn that my daughter is "super-intelligente" but very bossy, though remarkably, this has not cost her any friends.

Helena has finally — finally! — conquered the escalator. As a toddler she had no trouble stepping onto escalators, but then one day, she simply refused, gripped with fear. But like that, one day, we're suddenly past it.

Effective time management temporarily escapes my grasp. Not enough sleep. Little blogging. Cooking and baking, playing and reading. Wanting to do more, to do it all.

The snow! Isn't it beautiful?!

Lem's magnitude

Stanislaw Lem, it turns out, is very funny.

Imaginary Magnitude is a collection of introductions to nonexistent books.

One of my favourite segements is a promotional pamphlet for an encyclopedia that works on finely tuned prognostication, the wanted volume opening to the desired page as the reader stands in front of the shelf. The "extelopedia" predates Douglas Adams' infinite improbability drive by several years and books of J.K. Rowling's devising by a few decades, but it sounds to me like a hybrid of their magic technology.

This program subsequently underwent a thousandfold intensification and Extrapolational adaptation, thanks to which not only can it FORESEE WHAT WILL HAPPEN, if ANYTHING does happen, but also forsee [sic] precisely what will happen if It doesn't happen even a little, i.e., if It doesn't occur at all.

It's over the top, screaming with all its might in that most mysterious of all allegedly successful marketing ploys: Random CAPS!

Naturally, knowing MERELY THE LANGUAGE in which people will be communicating with one another and with machines ten, twenty, or thirty years hence does not mean knowing WHAT THEY WILL THEN most readily and most often be saying. And it is precisely THAT which we shall know, because as a rule people speak FIRST, and think and act LATER. The fundamental defect in all previous attempts at constructing a LINGUISTIC FUTUROLOGY, or PROGNOLINGUA, resulted from a FALSE RATIONALITY of procedure. Scholars have tacitly assumed that people will say ONLY REASONABLE THINGS in the Future and thus will have progressed.

Meanwhile, studies have shown that people LARGELY say SILLY THINGS.

Among the instantaneous updates are those to the price, "which — as you will appreciate, considering the state of the world economy — cannot be prognosticated more than twenty-four minutes beforehand."

The latter half of the book, "Golem XIV," an account of a supercomputer, is a little over my head (particularly in my lately stressed and flu-addled state), but the bonafide introductions, in their wit and interconnectedness, were highly entertaining.

Beyond pawns

Helena is frantic as we're gathering her things for school. Today's Thursday! It's chess club! She needs her folder! Where's her folder? Did I remember to put it in her backpack?!

I reassure her, and she finally sheds a little light on her panic. Today is the last day of this chess club session. Medals are to be awarded. She is convinced she has no chance of receiving one if she fails to bring her folder. I think she has little chance, period, being the youngest of the lot, but her enthusiasm tramples my negativity. We will cross the bridge of her disappointment when we come to it.

The workday finished, I run into Helena with her father just outside the school, so we can all walk home together. Helena reaches down into her jacket to pull out her medal.

I lavish her with obligatory congratulations and adulation, how I proud I am of her. But eventually I have to ask, cautiously. How many people received medals? Three, she tells me. The look in J-F's eyes tells me he knows and understands exactly what my line of questioning is, and that it's OK to proceed. How many kids are in your group? Eleven, she tells me, and only three of us got medals!

R-- got a medal because she's really the best, and the oldest, and she's really good. Helena got a medal because she had the most stickers on her folder, for homework problems completed. And M-- got one too, I'm not really sure why.

Flattery gushes more sincerely now. I'm ashamed of that moment in which I saw my own mother in me, doubting my daughter's accomplishments. I tell myself that it is a natural hesitation, measuring my response against a world where everyone gets a star for attendance, reserving it for justly deserved gains.

A week later, she's still proud and wants as much as ever to learn chess. We keep working through the problems she never finished. We set up the board to match the diagrams, so we can more easily see solutions.

J-F drops Helena at school one morning. He tells me they caught the attention of one of the other mothers. She seeks confirmation: So that's Helena. She got a medal? My son didn't get a medal. Do you coach her?

J-F tells her we play chess with Helena every day until she cries.