Finding Cake Again

I can't remember where I read it, or when, but I do remember reading that the moment you realize you will never read in Remembrance of Time Past is the moment you realize you are no longer young. So I set it to read it a few years ago in a bid to LIVE FOREVER. Now that I'm two years older, I realize that literature doesn't work that way. But in spite of my time-ravaged face and (presumably) worsening eyesight, I've rounded the corner on the final book of Proust's work.

So, I asked for madeleine pans for Christmas. Cheated out of eternal life, I wanted at least to be able to dunk a fresh-baked madeleine into a cup of tea the moment I hit the final period. And thanks to that timely gift and Julia Child's recipe for Madeleines de Commercy (reproduced on hungry sofia ) I think I will be able to.

French recipes for baked goods are, of course, fussy as fuck, but these are worth it. They "humped" perfectly in the oven, and once cooled had a slightly crunchy exterior that was perfect for soaking up tea. Or forcing you onto a journey of remembrance, as the case may be.

Even Smitty approved.

Always Moving, Never Resting

A few weeks ago, the owner of my current building sold the house. With these glad tidings (for the landlord) came the sad tidings that all of the renters would have to vacate the building. Our little ramshackle house was going to finally catch up with the rest of the street, and return to being a single dwelling for some well-heeled, well-educated family.

My roommate and I are okay. We will be moving, with the collection of cats, to a nice place at St. Clair West and Bathurst. There's an ice cream parlour and Filipino bakeries in the area, so I'm getting ready to let my pants out. Unfortunately, before I can do that, I need to pack up. Again. It's a process I should be familiar with, given the recent timeline of my life:

August 2010: Pack up 6 years of Montreal living; return to Guelph
September 2010: Move to Victoria
April 2011: Move to a new place in Victoria
September 2011: Move back to Guelph
February 2012: Move to first apartment in Toronto
August 2012: Move to second apartment in Toronto
January 2013 (proposed): Move to third apartment in Toronto
May 2013 (proposed): Give up; move to Fort McMurray... forever

But I don't really feel like I have another move in me. Probably because I moved into an apartment with what appears to be six waiter's friends and an apocalypse-appropriate store of red lentils, and who knows where it should all be packed and why.

So, if you know me in real life and you happen to be in Toronto the first weekend of January, please lend a hand. My sanity depends on it, and I can pay you in lentils. 

In the Bleak Midwinter

This week brought to you by the colour grey.

I wanted to post something cute and quirky, but ever since Friday, all I can think about are all those little boots and mittens, that are probably still on a cloakroom floor. When things like this happen - tragedy that seems like it should have been written, not lived - the general consensus is that it makes you think. About what? Judging by my friends on Facebook, it's an even split between gun control, mental health advocacy, and a deep aversion to ever reading the news, ever again. I find myself falling, distressingly, into the third camp. The first two issues are crucial, but even together they don't seem enough. And every time someone re-posts a simplistic condemnation of the "media" to their wall, the arithmetic gets worse. So, I'm not sure what to do. I go out, I keep busy, and then I write here, hoping to connect, in a warm room which keeps the cold at bay.

Domestic Thursday: Double the Bubbles

 Today was supposed to be a day of rest. With a doctor's appointment scheduled for the morning, I decided to take the whole frigging day off. My guidelines for when and why to choose work? If I will be spending as much time on the bus as I will at the job, then I might as well not go. And all was well, all was good, yoga classes were planned and library fines paid off... and then I called Rogers.

Nearly two hours of combined hold time later, I was done. Not only with that telecommunications company, but with the day. I didn't much feel like browsing the very limited beer selection in my neighbourhood LCBO for this week's installment of Domestic Thursday, so off I went to 3030.

This Red Ale is the first Church-Key beer I've covered on this blog, and it's an odd one. Not flavour-wise - it's a pretty mild red ale, noticeable carbonation, and a high note that made me think peach. It was just a little strange to have it in the context of the last Church-Key beer I had tried, which was the rather intense Holy Smoke. This one needs something else. Hockey, maybe. Or food.

And on to my related domestic endeavour... the production of closet beer. It's a maple stout, and so far it's merrily fermenting in my closet. I keep on threatening to call it Pride Beer once it's bottled and out of the closet. And hopefully, some of you will threaten to punch me for making such an awful, awful pun.

This Is Why I'm "Curvy"

In spite of my better judgment, the online dating profile persists. At the very least, it's been an interesting sociological experiment, from confusing mating rituals - God bless the man who worked KFC into a pick up line - to what an algorithm thinks is my type. Which is somebody who loves food. More than they could ever love me. Every time OKCupid barfs up another potential suitor, it's inevitably a white dude, with a beard, who mentions kimchi in his profile.

Now, I like to eat. And I really like to eat kimchi. But as excited as I am to try out good restaurants, I secretly love bad food almost as much as well-done ramen. A recent article on the AV Club reminded me of this - and now I'm sharing it with you all, in case you want to forward it to OKCupid's algorithm robot.

1. Wine gums. I once ate a pound of wine gums in what was probably, if I'm being generous with myself, an hour. I tried to undo the effects of this decision by then eating one slice of pizza, a case of food calculus that only made sense in my head, and never to my digestive system.

2. Popeye's Chicken Dinner. Everybody loves Popeye's biscuits, but I'm all about the coleslaw. Fuck the biscuit. Just give me two styrofoam bowls of coleslaw and some friend chicken bits, and I'm a happy, lipid-high lady.

3. Chicken McNuggets. I don't know why McDonald's felt compelled to proudly announce to the world that the McNuggets were "now" made with white meat. What the hell was I eating before? Oh well, even if it was ground-up donkey, it's still delicious when dipped in honey. Side note: you can't get honey for dipping in the UK. I now understand why my American friends fought to free themselves from British tyranny.

4. Kraft Dinner: Anyone who follows the box and divides it into four servings is a liar. Each box feeds 1.5 people, or 1 person who's depressed post-breakup.

5. Tim Horton's Bostom Cream Donuts: The crappiness of my workday can be gauged by which donut I've ordered. Sour cream plain? I'm on the ball! Honey crueller? Things are getting dangerous. Boston cream? I can probably be found crying in the bathroom.

Domestic Thursday: Future Past Edition

It's the 100% Instagram Edition, celebrating my glorious arrival into the present!

First, the beer:

Black Creek has a new beer available in liquor stores - Dray Horse Ale. It's supposed to represent the brewing traditions of Canada in the 1820's, and comes with a history lesson on the side of the bottle. The taste is very malty - with a chocolate flavour that might even be a little peaty. Like all of their beers, it's low on carbonation. 

Then, the knitting:

This orange blob has been keeping me company on all of my recent bus trips. It's Knitty's Que Sera pattern, worked in some vintage yarn I found at a liquidation centre years ago. It's nice, simple knitting now that I have the lace pattern memorized - except for the time I realized I put the button hole in the wrong place, and had to rip back two inches of lace worked in grabby mohair yarn. I survived though, and I am a stronger woman for it.

And here's my completed Summer Flies shawl. Finished just in time for... November. Oh well, there's always summer 2013!

iBuy It

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life. Because tomorrow is the day I will finally break down and buy a smartphone. Soon I will be Instagram-ing photos of all of my meals and using the word "app" as if it was a form of punctuation. Or whatever it is that kids do these days - I have been so steadfast in my self-imposed technological dungeon, where I get lost traveling to new places, never know a restaurant's Yelp rating, and can't resolve simple trivia questions, to really know what people do with these things. I'm sure they're awesome. I'm sure eventually my hand will grow around my iPhone, and it will sense my every urge, and then tweet it. But before I forget what my life was like pre-iPhone, let us take a moment to mourn my life B.P. Yes, it was filled with hours of tedium and confusion, but also the pleasures of getting lost along the way to a bike store, scurrying across a Victoria highway, and running into a pair of quail bobbing along the road.

Coming Out (Musically)

Back when I toiled in the pits of porno-doom, everybody at the office was convinced that I was an out and proud lesbian. As a lazy heterosexual, who didn't want to end up like Tom Cruise - protesting a little too much - it took a while to deny the reports. And I didn't help myself by reading Patricia Highsmith in the break room. Memories of the saddest twentysomething flirtation with lesbianism ever - all of the labels, none of the sex - came rushing back today.

Back then, I made the mistake of mentioning to my deskmate Will, the hero of my life and the only legitimately gay guy there, that the night before had featured a kd lang binge. He immediately set to cackling. "You're not helping yourself," he chortled. Well, if not helping myself means denying kd, I'll march in your damn parade. I've always felt like music snobs look down on her for some reason. Which is ridiculous. Vocally she's a ringer for Patsy Cline, and her Hymns from the 49th Parallel is a 11-song defense of the cover as art form. That's where you'll find the song I've been playing all day, her take on Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You." So let go of your pretensions, and give in to a Sunday morning of perfectly wrought melancholy. You can have happy brunches next week.

In the Cards

A few days ago, this landed in my inbox:

Subject: It's Time for Your Tarot Reading

$20 is all it takes to get a reading by UofT's renowned tarot reader. (Really! Look…Proof that I'm renowned! http://www.hrandequity.utoronto.ca/new/otc2/otcwdk.htm)

As always, 100% of the proceeds are in support of UTM's United Way campaign.

My first reaction was something along the lines of "Ah! Spammers!" Then I realized it was coming from the university listserv, at which point my reaction was something like "Ah! Foucauldian spammers!"

Once I realized it was on the level though, I was intrigued. In spite of my skeptical nature and schoolgirl crush on science, I own a tarot deck. Then again, if you were ever an awkward girl in high school, who had rented The Craft on VHS, you probably own a tarot deck too. It was the reader's endearing profile that eventually tipped me into asking for an appointment. If I couldn't spend time with a comic book-loving knitter and write the whole thing off as charitable giving, what the heck is the point of being alive? And, on that note, my life is/was a big hot mess, so maybe the cards would have the answers.

On the man front: I probably won't have a serious relationship in the next year, and I tend to focus on unattainable men. This last fact was indicated by the three of cups, which depicts a man gazing fixedly on a cup's mirage, ignoring the two decent ones at his feet. This, of course, was hardly news to me. In fact, the cup-o-vision has a name, which I won't share. I've also been neglecting my health. And the bad news didn't stop there. The cards also revealed that A FRIEND WOULD BETRAY ME. Will it be one of you? If it's not, and I get married and get in shape during the coming year, I am totally demanding a $20 refund from the United Way.

Bus Love

In the interests of my own emotional survival, I've cultivated a bus crush. If I take the bus to work at a certain time, or back eight hours later, I'll see him. Pale, bearded, probably undernourished, he'll be reading a book. I'll open mine in sympathy.

After six weeks, that's the level of intimacy we've achieved.

And I'm fine with that.

If I actually had to talk to him, and find out what he was reading, it could ruin everything. He could be gay, married, gay and married, or worst of all, be in the middle of reading a terrible book. My love is strong and true, but probably not strong enough to survive Atlas Shrugged. I would also have to confront the fact that my passion is one of convenience. Ever since I slung books at my university bookstore, I've nurtured crushes on coworkers, as a patch whenever the work, or even the paycheque, was not enough. Unfortunately, this didn't work out so well in Victoria, where I had no office options, few local options, and probably ended up fixated on a longboarder because of all that. I have a similar problem with my current job, but the Commuting Reader seems to be the solution.

I just pray he never buys a car.

Domestic Thursday: Black Creek Pumpkin Ale

Photo by Ally

My fridge is still looking festive, thanks to more pumpkin beer and a particularly spoooooky dessicated swiss chard. Woooooo. 

That should probably be thrown out, though I will hold on to Black Creek Historic Brewery's Pumpkin Ale. You may remember Black Creek from my December outing. As a brewery headquartered in a historical village, it's dedicated to preserving the brewing traditions of the 19th century - for ales produced on-site, at least. LCBO-sourced bottles like this one are made in a commercial space, to meet demand... and because sticking on labels using Ye Olde Flour Paste would have been tedious. 

Unlike Mill Street's entry, this one is strictly barley-based. My fellow beer questers, Aleks and Ally, tried both. Aleks found Mill Street's to be very fizzy and a little more bitter, while she tasted citrus in Black Creek's, and liked it better. I would agree. The spices seemed better balanced in this brew, and I even thought there was something woodsy about it, before the beer kicked in and reminded me that I was being unbearably pretentious. As Aleks pointed out, neither tastes all that much like pumpkin, though both smell like a fresh-baked pie. Thirty days later, I hope to figure out if that's because pumpkin is such a subtle taste to infuse, or if the spices overwhelm everything else. Cheers to research. 

In Which My Toe Gets Bitten Off in Shallow Water...

This past weekend I was in the throes of the "afternoon drunks," and decided to start an online dating profile.

It was a decision I regretted within an hour.

That was how long it took for some dude, high on male privilege and/or life, to message me an analysis of my personality based on my dating profile, ending with "How can you be more idealistic than you look if you don't even have a picture up lol" First, I didn't have time to put one up, second, I'm not very photogenic, third FUCK YOU and fourth lol, YOU ASSHOLE.

Anyway, I kept my profile up, lol, in spite of this small setback. Pinball Mike from 3030 met his current girlfriend through a dating site, and Pinball Mike is pretty great. Maybe I could meet the generic, Mr. Pibbs-version of Pinball Mike! So I felt somewhat optimistic when I got a message from another potential suitor. The hat was questionable, but at least it was clear that he had taken the time to read my profile. Before messaging him back I thought I would read it too. Bam. Married, and in an open relationship.

I will die alone.

No one will mourn my passing.

Except maybe the cats.

But all is not lost. When I texted my conclusions to my friend S, we agreed to die alone... together.

Domestic Sunday: The Month of Pumpkin Beer Begins

There are three ways of finding out whether it's the fall or not - check the calendar, look at the leaves, or see if a multitude of pumpkin beers have overtaken the liquor stores. I never heard of pumpkin beer until I moved to Montreal, and then all the talk was about the St-Ambroise Citrouille. And that beer felt like it was an urban legend, selling out within days and never ending up in my belly. Now there are so many pumpkins beers available, that I could try one a week and still have bottles leftover by October 31st.

So let's get things started with Mill Street's Nightmare on Mill Street. This is a wheat beer, brewed with pumpkin puree, pie spices and vanilla extract. The vanilla can be smelled as soon as the bottle is opened, but doesn't come through as aggressively on the taste. It's almost all spice, with some pumpkin knocking about. I would like it to feel a little heavier on the tongue - take away the flavour, and it sits as lightly as a soda pop. I would like my pumpkin beers to be a little more robust than that, if they're going to take me through the fall and right into winter.

Book Pile for September 29

1. Rageful Reading: Days of Destruction Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco
2. Nobel-Certified Novel: The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
3. The Anti-Downton Abbey: Some Do Not... and No More Parades, Ford Madox Ford
4. Essays from My New Heroine: Beginning to See the Light, Ellen Willis

The Frankly Creepy Truth About Charlie: The Stoker Trailer

Having just watched Shadow of a Doubt, the trailer for Stoker felt intriguingly familiar. The uncle is just as sinister, but the incest is more textual, and Nicole Kidman's mad mom is a neat perversion of the apple-pie perfection of the family in Hitchcock's film. In addition to the content, the talent behind Stoker might be worth the ticket. The director is Park Chan-wook. His Oldboy may be one of the most operatic, beautiful and straight-out looney tunes films ever shown, which is already good news. And the script is written by Wentworth Miller. Prison Break Wentworth Miller. He may have never been one of my top celebrity crushes, but I can recognize his attractiveness on an intellectual level. And now that he's made his (surely) beautiful (and well-manicured) fingers type out a screenplay, I can't decide whether I'm impressed or jealous. On the one hand, he didn't have to. On the other, it's all a little bit greedy.

Post-Rush Daze

I... live!!

Barely. 

But still, here I am. Not completely bald, at least not yet, but very, very tired. And more than a little hateful of humanity. I used to pride myself on my excellent sense of customer service. Although I may have been confused or stressed out by customers and their needs, I would always remember that we were all just people, paddling the good boat Life through some rocky, rocky waters. 

Fuck that. Ready the missiles, and point them at the battleship Life. It's full of horrible people, and must be brought to the bottom of the ocean. Alright, I'm not completely homicidal. But after 12-14 hour work days where you don't even take a lunch, things continue to go wrong, every Quebec vendor is a separatist about sending you your damn books, and some students are completely helpless, you start to get snappish. Which is why I'm sitting in a cafe right now, instead of logging more time at the job. There were tons of little things around the store I could have done, from following up with certain professors, to re-organizing our used book storage, but it all probably would have ended with me chucking a textbook at somebody's head. 

And so I'm taking a day off to remember what it was like to read, knit, and watch X-Men on Netflix. Long live the weekend.

The Baldening

Readers, a confession: I AM BALDING. My friends and family insist that it's nothing but the product of my Woody Allen-esque levels of anxiety, but whatever.  What do they know? I've googled "female thinning hair," so I'm an expert. Clearly. But between the assurances of my family, and the fear mongering of the internet, it levels out into a sense of dread every time I look in a mirror. My hair used to be many things- mostly frizzy, unmanageable, occasionally achieving a state of curly perfection - but it was never thin. The bathtub was clogged within weeks when I moved to my last place, and I've broken off comb teeth in my hair.

Where did it all go? Let's say it was a combination of work stress and... lupus (thanks, Internet!), moving on to figuring out what to do when the final hair falls from my head. Comic books have taught me that an exciting career in super villainy is open to me. Perhaps Lex Luthor wasn't born bad, he just went bald. Though I guess Professor X is a positive role model. I'm trying to think of any bald female comic book characters, and I'm mostly thinking of aliens. In movies, there are plenty of bald ladies, but they're also sick bald ladies, destined to improve the lives of others before they pass on in a most videogenic way. I won't be one of them. I don't have a deadly disease, and even if I did, I would like to spend my final days drunkenly berating everyone who ever wronged me. Pop culture has left me adrift. What should I do, readers? Charge fifty cents a rub?

Domestic Thursday Returns

The yarn for this scarf - Elsbeth Lavold's Hempathy - cycled through two failed tank tops, before I realized it was never meant to be a garment. Now I'm churning out a version of Summer Flies. The hemp yarn, combined with the open pattern, should make the scarf light enough to wear three seasons of this year. Sadly, the beer I'm drinking right now will last only one - it's Beau's seasonal "Festivale" beer, which I bought at the end of its summer run. The style is altbier, and it is delicious, or at least almost as delicious as beginning to knit again, after a long absence from the needles.

Ring-a-ding-ding

I had originally scheduled a long, somewhat whiny post to explain a month full of weirdness on my part. But then my phone rang. 

And it was good. 

My great friend/other half of my brain is now engaged. Suddenly, things didn't seem so grim. Katie was happy. Martin was happy. And I was happy, because I like them both, and finally have an excuse to do "research" by watching Say Yes to the Dress.

Book Covers I Have Loved: Butterfly in the Typewriter

Biography covers can be so dull. They all use the same portraits of major subjects, whether painted or photographed, and use a tasteful serif typeface. So I appreciate something different. Here's a cheeky take on the profile photo for Cory MacLauchlin's Butterfly in the Typewriter (designer currently unknown.) Take an image of a famous author, and paste in cutouts of the accoutrements of his most notable character. John Kennedy Toole meets Ignatius Reilly's hat, mustache, and yes- hot dog. It highlights the autobiographical relation between text and author, while pointing out that they're not homogenous. They just relate through sticky bonds.

Take This Waltz, or the Mild Inconvenience of Indecision

It's been a few days since I caught Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz, and I finally figured out how to describe the plot. It's Twilight for CBC listeners! Seriously, Michelle Williams' Margot - Toronto cred proved by her Pages tote bag - is torn between nice guy werewolf cookbook writer Jacob Lou, and the dangerously sexy vampire rickshaw artist Edward Daniel. To be fair to Polley, Waltz does have moments of genuine emotional honesty where Twilight has troubling gender politics, but there was still a main character with problems she would prefer not to solve. So the slow motion and golden lighting started to feel a little much. As endearing as Michelle Williams can be, my sympathy to any character who will gain mournfully into an oven door while sweating buckets is minimal.

Fellow Torontonians might appreciate spotting beer bottles from local breweries, or triangulating the location of Margot and Lou's apartment using local cafés and cinemas for guidance. My guess is Little Portugal.

Book Pile for July 2

1. Current (Incredibly Depressing!) Non-Fiction Read: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, Anne Fadiman
2. Next Cancon Read: The Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro (this time I won't be trying to read the laundromat's copy between loads)
3. "I Picked This up Because the Guardian Gave it a Good Blurb and, Yes, I'm That Kind of Person" Novel: King of the Badgers, Philip Hensher
4. Crime Does Pay Book of the Month: The Heat's On, Chester Himes
5. Autobiographic Comic Option: French Milk, Lucy Knisley
6. Better Keep Sharp Knives and Army Camps Away From Me: Forbidden Colors, Yukio Mishima

History Lives... ish

Much like other things in my life - *cough* lady business *cough* - my reading is on a cycle. CanLit followed by a contemporary novel, then a classic, and finally some non-fiction before we're right back to Canadian again. My dedication to this system is irrational, and limiting, but I can't abandon it. I am, however, open to manipulating it. Books can be from both categories, which comes in handy if there's another I would really like to get on with.

Recently, I tried being strict about the categories, which meant I read Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues (Canadian) and Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies (Contemporary) close together. They're both historical novels with pedigrees. Blues won the Giller, and Bodies is the sequel to the Booker-winning Wolf Hall. It would have been hard not to compare them while reading - objectively. Or to avoid finding the comparison more flattering to one than the other - subjectively.

Because, in spite of this powerful one-two punch of historical fiction, it's a genre I typically avoid. Why? A writerly tic I call the research dump. Here's an example:  

"It was the beginning of the western offensive. The Krauts hurtled through Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg. Every hour the lines of the map was changing. Day after the Coup, Lilah reported to us that the British ain't got a government, that some damn joker named Churchill taken over. Then the Frogs sent their armies north, and the Limeys opened up a front against the Krauts." (Half Blood Blues)

I suspect writers do it either because they want to get back to their characters and out of historical context, or they just want to show that all that time with the microfiche really meant something. Whatever the cause, it tends to make the narrative hurtle off its path (and into Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg.) But there is another way, as Mantel shows in Bodies:

"8 January: the news arrives at court. It filters out from the king's rooms then runs riot up staircases to the rooms where the queen's maids are dressing, and through the cubby holes where kitchen boys huddle to doze, and along lanes and passages through the breweries and the cold rooms for keeping fish, and up again through the gardens to the galleries and bounces up to the carpeted chambers where Anne Boleyn sinks to her knees and says, 'At last God, not before time!' The musicians tune up for the celebrations."

It takes Mantel at least 30% more words to give less than 0% of the hard facts Edugyan provides. The point of this passage -  that Henry VIII's first wife has finally died - is not even explicitly stated. But it says plenty about the social makeup of Tudor England, and the crooked path of its gossip, as well as how Catherine's death will be something less than mourned. This is all more interesting than the data of her death. That difference is why we pick up an historical novel, and not an encyclopedia. And why I'll probably return to one of these books, before the other.

Frugal Living

I sometimes entertain notions of starting a Tumblr called "Lifestyle Tips for the Depressingly Frugal." It would feature your usual lifestyle blog photography (macro lens!) and tips for people who are comfortable admitting that even the simulacra of luxury - the how-to's of real lifestyle blogs -  are still out of their league. For example, my recent tip: when you can't afford the spa, or even the cheap nail bar down the street, you can always read descriptions of expensive spa services online, while rubbing your back as best you can. Unfortunately, my targeted readership probably can't afford weekly yoga classes (which are like $17 a pop), so they should probably prepare for the back rub by... reading descriptions of yoga classes online. Sadly, those are pretty much my only tips (except for my dissertation on the merits of various President's Choice products), so it would be a brief affair.

The Bus Reader

A few weeks ago, I started a new job in Mississauga. For those of you not versed in Toronto geography, picture a postcard with the CN tower. Roughly, that is the center of Toronto. Now, start going west until you fall off the edge of a postcard and into a strip mall. That is Mississauga. Next, go east, past the other edge and into a concrete parking lot. That would be where I live now. The journey from point A to point B requires a long subway ride and an even longer bus ride, each trip taking an hour and forty minutes. 

Fortunately, this gives me over three hours, total, of prime reading time a day. That's at least 100 pages, unless I'm reading Saul Bellow's Herzog. For reasons unknown, my Mississauga bus gets suddenly re-routed over the Khyber Pass before it shudders into Islington Station. It's hard to concentrate on beautifully-wrought sentences while your ride is clearing two metre wide craters, so I gave up. Yes, the ride would probably be smoother if I didn't insist on sitting in the accordion part of the bus, pretending it's the same thing as a free ticket to Canada's Wonderland, but maybe Bellow could have written shorter sentences. It's called compromise.

And there's an art to picking out the perfect bus book. Either it's respectable enough to read cover-art, or it's a paperback so you can curl the cover around. But don't be too pretentious - you don't want to be that person reading Kant on the bus, because then you're likely that asshole putting their bag on the empty seat too. Then there is the question of value vs. volume. I favour a hefty book, but not so thick that it won't fit in my side bag. Unfortunately, I've started to feel like I've already read nearly every book meeting those criteria, which means I'll soon start in on Fifty Shades of Grey, which can only end in the gutter. That is, Metro, the free daily newspaper, or more accurately, "Stock Photo Daily."

My Brilliant Retail Plan

Here's a thought: everyone, no matter how expansive their desk or comfy their chair, should have to work a week in retail for every two years that they are otherwise employed. Kind of like how the Swiss require military service, we should require customer service. Think of all the benefits. A humbler society, where few would loudly demand if YOU know who THEY ARE, or not tell you they are digging around for change until after you've closed the till. They would wait for you to finish stocking a shelf, or accept that sometimes a product runs out, and would keep their children in line. It's a glorious dream, isn't it? So why can't we make this happen, instead of pushing useless crime omnibus bills through? I think Stephen Harper is just squared of working at Arby's.

Some Things I Miss About Victoria, BC

I'm not a mammal who handles the heat well. So Toronto's recent wave of warm weather - and all the sweating, thirsting, and general whining it brought with it - has made me miss my old home. Victoria. Where the weather is neither too warm nor too cold, and people still wear Baja pullovers. And now that I've started missing Victoria's climate, my mind has turned to the other things I miss about that city. I did one of these for Montreal, and now it's Victoria's turn.

1. The Drink and Draw crowd: Leaving this band of interesting and talented young folks behind was the hardest thing about moving back east. Sure, they were inspiring artists, but they were also excellent people, welcoming an odd girl from Ontario into their brunch eating and bike riding lifestyle. Thanks to Facebook, I know they're all doing well, but that doesn't stop me from wishing I could know that from first-hand experience.
2. Hernande'z: Their bean burritos haunt my dreams. Sometimes I wake up with a tear upon my cheek, wondering why my mouth tastes of delicious, delicious beans when all my fridge holds is a frozen dinner I forgot to put in the freezer.
3. Legends Comics: I still haven't found a replacement in Toronto for my favourite comic book store. It wasn't just that their selection was awesome, but Gareth (one of the co-owners) is such a peach. He gave me a hug when I was preparing to leave the city, and I briefly considered never washing my arms again. I decided against that- it would be disgusting otherwise - but I did use him as an example of excellent customer service in a job interview.
4. Seeing Whales on the Way to Vancouver: British Columbians were greedy when it came to natural beauty, and it has made them weak. WEAAAAKK. They barely seem excited when a bus ride brings stunning vistas of lakes, forest and mountains. My walk in my current Toronto neighbourhood brings me to soul-stirring sight of a Popeye's Chicken outlet. Anyway, I once saw a whale and her calf off of a BC ferry, and my heart grew four sizes that day.
5. Cold Comfort Ice Cream: Ah, Saturday mornings. When I would mount my faithful Korean wonder bike, Bikegolgi, and zip down to the Moss Street Market. I always bought a few vegetables, but those were mostly out of guilt. The true goal of my mission was always an ice cream sandwich from Autumn. Favourites included sour cherry with rosemary, honey lavender and apricot.

Drawing Catwoman: Too Big Not to Fail

Image credit: Tucker Stone, The Comics Journal

That... thing comes from Catwoman #8. Now, I have a few problems with the image, but somehow it's the little ones - and not the glaring, anatomically incorrect ones - that niggle most. WHY ARE THERE TINY CAT CHARMS ON THE STRINGS OF HER BIKINI BOTTOM? First of all, the strings. The strings. Why? Now, I may not be a sexy cat burglar myself, but I think they might pose some practical issues. For example, they might unravel right over a laser sensor. That's both embarrassing and unprofessional. Then, the charms. I always figured Catwoman was a confident thirty-year-old woman with some BDSM tendencies, not somebody with the same tastes as a teenaged girl. On the other side, are there charms that express her dedication to chess club and marching band? And oh yes: I almost forgot about the breasts.

Now, talking about the depiction of women in superhero comics isn't the freshest topic in circulation. It's been so churned over, that critics and artists have reached some kind of uneasy detente over the matter. Women will continue to be drawn like they don't need rib cages, and people who don't like it can pass over the spandex for any D and Q title. That's not the point of this post. Rather, I wanted to figure out why this image bothered me more than some of the first drawings of Catwoman I saw as a young, fresh comic book fan. Those were dark years. Those... were the Balent years. For the uninitiated, Jim Balent was the main artist on Catwoman's solo title back in the late '90s, and a firm believer that female anatomy included beach balls embedded just below the neck. Here's an example of his sensibility:

And yet, swimsuit issue Catwoman irritates me more. Jim Balent's vision was so ridiculous that it could be interpreted a clever parody if you were feeling generous, harmless silliness if you weren't. But this Catwoman is just realistic enough to irritate, just realistic enough that it doesn't seem patently ridiculous. It seems achievable. Furthermore, the artist, Adriana Melo, is a woman. Female writers or artists are still a minority on mainstream titles, but when we do get representation, this is the product? I know I should take a deep breath and give Melo the benefit of the doubt. I can't fight for more female creatives, only to dictate what they can produce. And I'm not so naive as to forget Melo was probably working under certain (DD-sized) expectations. But still. At least give Catwoman a form-fitting wetsuit and lose the girly charms. Otherwise, we might have to call Balent back in, that is if he's not too busy haunting vaginas.

RIP Pistache

Other things Pistache loved beside human affection: lying on a plate for no discernable reason.

My favourite foster cat, Pistache, had to be put down a few days ago. I guess I've truly become the crazy cat lady I had feared was my destiny, because the news has put me in a funk. The funk is incomprehensible to my friends and family. Pistache had nearly every disease known to cat, from FIV to a brief bout with ringworm. Of course, this didn't stop him from trying to force his physical affections onto any conveniently located human. He was remarkably affectionate. According to the shelter, where he once held the record of most obese inmate, he was rescued from a cat colony in Rosemont, circa 1999. I doubt he was born into that colony, because the call of the wild had long ago been put on mute to his ears. He once escaped from my apartment in Montreal, only to immediately enter the open door of the apartment next to mine. He couldn't even kill an ant. I saw him try. And then fail. But although I couldn't trust his skills as a mouser, he was just a big bag of unconditional, rather smelly, love. He would curl up beside me as I read a book, watch me type on my computer, and attempt to sleep on my collarbone as I watched The National.

Life events and an ill-timed move meant I never got to adopt him permanently, but he spent the last two years of his life perfectly content with a friend. And although she replaced me in his heart, nothing could ever push him out of mine. Because, though I've never met another cat who smelled so bad, I also haven't met one who loved so much.

Why You Should Read William Langewiesche

Every week, or at least whenever I can remember, I link to one piece of non-fiction writing on my Twitter. I try to vary the authors and magazines as much as I can, which is hard. Because all I want to do is share William Langewiesche's work, and that would take the better part of a year of faithful linking. I guess I'm a Langewiesche fangirl, in the way other people geek out over G.R.R. Martin or Neil Gaiman. He has a beautiful style, without being a beautiful stylist. His prose is direct and his diction rarely surprises, but he's a genius at presenting the facts at their proper facets, so they can illuminate each other. He's at his best when he describes the failures of machines - shuttles that explode, ships that sink, airplanes that collide with each other - or of the men who run them, and at his worst with one-subject profiles. Profiles are all about the colour and texture of the notable they're describing. They circle instead of heading straight for the problem. As a former pilot, Langewiesche is more direct. He describes the circumstances of every collapse, then works through to the end with clarity and grace, so that it almost seems like fate. Here are the final sentences of my favourite piece, "Columbia's Last Flight," from the November 2003 issue of the Atlantic:

As had happened with the Challenger in 1986, the crew cabin broke off intact. It assumed a stable flying position, apparently nose high, and later disintegrated like a falling star across the East Texas sky. 

And now you have something to read for the rest of your Sunday.

Domestic Thursday: Blind Owls

When it comes to knitting sweaters, I have a pattern. No matter how energetically I start, two years later I'll only have the back, front, and lonely sleeve of a painfully dated sweater. Kate Davies' Owls Sweater is the exception. The more I knit, the more I liked knitting it, until I gave myself a wrist injury cabling the owls on the yoke. But now I have to sew on 40+ wee button eyes to a stubbornly fluid piece of fabric, all so my decorative owls can see. This seems like the kind of tedious work in the service of twee that should be contracted. Who would be an appropriate party? The missing third Deschanel sister?

News from a Social Media Hermit

For my few dedicated readers out there, I'm sorry I disappeared so suddenly and abruptly. For reasons I won't go into here, I thought scaling back my Twitter and my blog were necessary for a short period of time. Of course, I missed serving up my loopy thoughts on everything from the Tebow trade to Mad Men on a semi-frequent basis. My poor friends were stuck listening to me ramble on in person. But I had made a vow, and by gum, I would stick with it. But yesterday I realized that deleting my blog and disappearing from the Internet were the wrong decisions, and choosing to stick with them was kind of like keeping your foot on the gas and hoping the brick wall would bend to your will. Now my Twitter's back, and so's this blog, so expect a post on those playoff ads for the Hockey Hall of Fame in the near future, and more beer. Facebook will remain dormant though, becuase - ew.

Hate-Watching the Walking Dead

Although they're not "spoilers" as such, plot points of recent episodes will be discussed. Be advised.

As established by thinky types on the Internet (and accepted by yours truly) we're living in a golden age of television. I am, of course, spending these burnished years watching a bunch of irritable characters I don't like, engaged in actions that make little sense, during an hour that leaves me bored nearly every week. Yes, The Walking Dead has become the only TV show I regularly watch, and I have no idea why. I didn't even want to start watching it. I had read the first two dozen issues of the comic, which started strong before devolving into a travel diary with the occasional disemboweling. Also: the kind of retrograde sexual politics that really make you appreciate how progressive Dawn of the Dead was - in 1978.

So I should have known better, but then I also bought a ticket to Sex and the City 2. Sometimes I don't make healthy lifestyle choices. The pilot was pretty tight, but The Walking Dead soon became The Talky Living, as debates over whether to go on living in a dead world, and whether to value survival over morals, were endlessly rehashed. Characters were tweaked from scene to scene, seemingly just so these arguments could have legs. And outside of lead Sheriff Rick, his wife Lori, and best frenemy Shane, the characters are tragically, yet hilariously underdeveloped. Whenever the action drags, just try and figure out what T-Dog, the sole surviving black member of the group, does whenever he's not on screen. That's about 98% of each episode. Is he basketweaving his way through the zombie apocalypse? God, I hope so. But in spite of all these problems, I keep on watching. Shamefully, it's probably for the gore. In a world of Downton Abbeys and The Good Wifes, there must be room for a decent zombie chomp. And The Walking Dead can still engage by making it an unexpected corpse, from turning Sophia into a child zombie, to gutting Dale last week. Until it runs out of people to kill off, or the budget gets cut to the point where all deaths happen offscreen, I'll still be watching, waiting like a thirteen-year-old boy for the good bits to go splat.

Mr. Nice Goon

Another year, another English Canadian film is anointed by some mysterious marketing power. The francophones can be counted on to support their movies, but we anglos need prodding. We need the kind of prolonged campaign that covers every surface in Toronto with marketing, the kind of offensive usually only mustered by the CBC for its comedies (ie, the reason why when I sleep, I dream of Mr. D, which may be why I also wake up screaming.) This year's candidate seems to be Goon, judging from bus stop ad saturation. Sadly, it's not an adaptation of the cult horror comic. Instead, it's about Doug, played by Sean William Scott, a loveable hulk with fists of steel and a brain of cotton candy. Doug finds his calling on the ice as an enforcer, getting on the rink only to mash somebody's face into pudding. I might have found the movie funnier in another year. But after a season dominated by player safety and concussions, a season which also started with a string of dead enforcers, it's hard to chuckle. I may have even found it funnier on another day, but the theatre was almost empty that weeknight. But even playing a decade ago to a full house, Goon would have some issues. Scott's endearing, and Liev Schreiber as Doug's more philosophical rival goon is great, but they're both in a movie that's mostly predictable. An example: Doug's disapproving father is trying to save face at shul, using his other, doctor son. But that's before this other son bounds away to meet up with his partner. I immediately calculated the likelihood that the partner was either another man (90%), or a ridiculously trashy shiksa (10%). And lo, the partner arrived, and verily, he was fabulous. Sadly, Slap Shot still does it better, and it's almost 40 years old.

Domestic Friday: Marmelade Cake and Wellington's Special Pale Ale

Ah, marmelade cake. It's so good it survives even my accidental screw-ups. Like the slight charring of the edges. Or my dislike of fiddling with parchment paper, so the top and bottom both become a little too brown. Whatever, it all looks fine if you take the time to pose it just so in the afternoon light. Don't worry, I'm usually drinking my tea out of the same mug I've used for the past two days, and the only plate is the shirt that catches my crumbs. But I figured I would make the effort for you guys.

The recipe is Lucy Waverman's, printed years ago in the Globe and Mail. I've reproduced it below, just in case the Globe ever takes it down. Take her advice though, and put the effort into cutting out the parchment paper. You won't have to fluff your cake as much I did.


Ingredients:
Cake:

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup room temperature butter
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup Seville orange marmalade
• 1 teaspoon grated orange rind
• 2 eggs

Glaze:

• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup orange juice

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Place parchment paper on base of an 8-inch round cake pan. Butter sides of pan (I would grease the underside of the parchment paper first too.)
2. Sift flour, baking powder and salt into a large bowl.
3. Add butter, sugar, marmalade, rind and eggs. Beat with an electric mixer until well mixed. Spoon batter into prepared cake pan (it's pretty thick).
4. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes in middle of oven or until a toothpick comes out clean. *Place a layer of parchment paper over top of the cake during the final 15 minutes of baking to keep if from becoming too brown.*
5. Bring sugar and orange juice to boil. Remove from heat. Prick holes in cake (or stab it with a fork!!) and brush with glaze. Cool for 30 minutes, then remove cake from pan and let it cool some more.
It tastes wonderful with tea, but give this cake its due and skip the bags for loose tea leaves.

You could also drink some beer. This blog will not judge you. This week's beer is a shout-out to my hometown of Guelph. Wellington Brewery is Ontario's, and apparently, Canada's oldest indie. Founded in 1985, it is still going strong in the G-spot, as well as wherever its distinctive rubber boot taps can be found. The Special Pale Ale is, surprisingly, mild on the hops. It's good for drinking in quantity, but if you're expecting a West Coast-style IPA, you'll probably want more bitterness. But then nothing will ever make you happy, will it?

Paths to Resilience

Back when my work days were rated X, I used to try and start every one of them in a state of pitched over-excitement. It was fake, of course. But I figured that if I went in at 9am as if I was high on life and/or cocaine, I could leave at 5pm feeling only mildly disgusted with the human condition. Lately, though, it seems like I've lost that ability. I wake up feeling cursed. Not cursed like I'll turn into a werewolf when the moon is full, or cursed like a streetcar is going to run over my leg before noon. But I am becoming increasingly worried that nothing will work out right that day (or ever.) So I have moved on to stage two of dealing with this. And that, by the way, is repeating Albert Camus' quote that "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." Unfortunately, the best I could muster today was muttering "Invincible summer! Invincible summer! INVINCIBLE SUMMER!!" as the wind strafed my face with ice pellets. At least there's always stage three: baking a marmelade cake.

Domestic Monday: Striped Socks and a Spring Bock

Well, looks like you guys will get a two-fer (but not a two-four) of these domestic posts this week. The lateness of this one comes from the bad case of knitting blahs I've been battling for the past few weeks. I thought it was just post-holiday malaise, but I think I've discovered the true root: TOO MANY DAMN SOCKS.

I discovered my half-finished Broadripples after one completed sock and its matching ball of yarn spent no less than FIVE YEARS buried under my stash. I thought I would be able to finish these in days. They're knit at a relatively large gauge for socks, the pattern is more exciting than plain stockinette, and my shame would drive me forward. But not so much. Two weeks later, they're finally finished. I did start the second sock from the wrong end of the ball, so the colours don't match up. Oh well. After five years, asking for perfection would be asking for a little much. But finishing this long-abandoned pair has made me realize that I'm bored with socks. I've knit too many of them, and not enough sweaters. And that is why I came back from Guelph with a suitcase full of yarn.

I haven't had any trouble finding good beer though, and this week I'm here to tell you about Amsterdam's Spring Bock. Bocks are malty, lightly hopped lagers that are usually dark in colour and high in alcohol. Amsterdam releases this one every spring, and you can cellar your bottle for another year, or just drink it right now. It goes down smoothly and ends by tasting a little like burnt marshmallow, so watch out - or else that 7% ABV will get you.

Whit Stillman's Back!: Damsels in Distress

Glad tidings from the trailer front, for once - it appears Whit Stillman has made another movie. If you haven't seen a Stillman film yet, describing them would probably not encourage you to do so. He mostly shoots wealthy folks who have the emotional maturity of pre-teens, but the vocabularies of tenured English professors. And yet - Stillman doesn't let his fondness for these hapless youths stop him from recording their antics with all the dedication of an anthropologist. You can check out Metropolitan or The Last Days of Disco. Disco is particularly recommended, for the stellar duds the costumer designer found for Kate Beckinsale.

The trailer for Damsels in Distress isn't that promising, but Stillman's meandering tone would always be a difficult fit for a two-minute format. I'm willing to wait until April 6th to give my final judgment. I'll be there in theatres, with my tap shoes on.

How to Be a Sophisticate: Or, Lessons Learned from City Living

On the right, a sophistcated female. On the left, me. Note the difference.

I have been a busy student since moving to Toronto. And this time I'm not talking about my stats class, I'm talking about style. I wanted to know what separated me from the other girls here. Were we not both human? Do we not both bleed red? Well, we probably do, but I'm sure the other girls look much better doing so. My problem is that I'm not sophisticated, just endearing. But that hasn't stopped me from learning why I'm not, so I could share my observations with you. Who knows - you may have to go Toronto someday, and you'll want to blend in with the ruling cultural class. My first lesson in sophistication was a swift one. And it is that a small head is a necessary condition. Small heads can bear more hair and make every neck look long. The problem is that my head is large. Massive. Unnatural, even. So, as other girls gracefully stride down Queen West, I waddle forward, a honeydew melon atop a pea coat.

Being forever banned from stylishness hasn't stopped me from learning other lessons, however. Even those with gigantic heads can benefit from the second lesson I've learned, which is that sophistication comes in only one colour, and that colour is black. Entire sections of Queen and King look like funeral processions when work lets out, as fleets of young professionals in black Canada Goose jackets, black duffel coats, black leggings and black boots stream out of work. I come here not to bury the look, but to identify it. It makes sense though. Black is slimming, clashes with nothing, and lets you go stealth at night.

The final lesson in sophistication, if you already have a big head and nothing black but a pair of polyester pants, is that you can always blow your hair out. Shiny hair that hovers in that liminal state between straight and wavy can make anyone look "right." Of course, sophisticated doesn't mean chic. I have seen some looks on the street that have made me stare out of the streetcar window and take notice, like the man with the mile-high top fade and puffy purple coat, and few of them have involved black.  But that sense of style is a rare thing, and sophisticated is a close-enough simulacrum, if you can afford a hair dryer.

Domestic Failday: Crappy Cooking and Trafalgar's Irish Ale

Instead of my default domestic activity, I was going to do something different. I was going to photograph my cooking. Then I would talk about how I lost my cooking mojo, but now I wanted to experience the joys of cooking for myself again, etc. etc. Cooking brings us together. Cooking will save the world. Unfortunately, it's hard to get all poetic about food when you've just produced a big pile of blah. Or, rather, a puddle of blah, as my attempt at making the Mushroom Curry from the original Moosewood Cookbook resulted in a big pot of spicy-flavoured water. Every so often, though, a mushroom floats by at its leisure.

Frankly, I blame those hippies at Moosewood. I'm not in Victoria anymore, so I can go back blaming hippies for everything. (Though to be fair to our hemp-wearing, kombucha-raising brethren, it was my fault for adding too much water.)

At least there's beer to dull the pain! I pulled this out of the fridge, telling my roommate that "this will make things allllll better." He seemed confused. "So, you're going to add more liquid to something that's already too liquidy?" "No," I replied, "I'm going to add more liquid to me." And indeed I did. Now, I know that's not the perfect glass to be serving a brown ale like this in, but post-dinner disaster, I didn't much care. Oh, the mushrooms I had sliced and the onions I had diced. After all that, my Irish Ale from Oakville's Trafalgar Ales and Meads (who also brewed this Smoked Oatmeal Stout) was going into the nearest glass. Let's all be glad it wasn't a sippy cup. It's a nice beer, not aggressive at all, and with a flavour that's more sweet than bitter. It also seems to sometimes appear under the name Celtic Pure Irish Ale, but I prefer the simpler name. It reminds me less of Michael Flatley.

Book Pile for February 16

1. Sure to be Depressing Novel: Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler
2. Mitford Fest Vol. 2: Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
3. Mitford Fest Vol. 1: The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
4. Pretty Much Close Captioned This American Life Reading: Take the Cannoli, Sarah Vowell
5. The “Dipping My Toe into SciFi” Novel: The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
6. For My Ill-Advised Homesteading Dreams: Homegrown & Handmade, Deborah Niemann

Solving Racism, One Six Pack At a Time

A few weeks ago, I read a little item on The Onion's AV Club about 2 Broke Girls. After being accused of racism due to the half-dimensionality of the girls' Korean boss, 2 Broke Girls would add a "hot Asian guy" to make everything better. Since then, the idea of solving all problems of racism, power and privilege with a liberal application of Preparation S(exy) has made me think. What if other famous examples of racism could be hot-washed this way?

For example, in Gone with the Wind, hire Zoe Saldana to shoot some extra scenes, where she gets in a sexy catfight with Scarlett O'Hara. Petticoats will be torn!!! George Lucas can bring the same technology he used to add scenes to the Star Wars trilogy for those special editions, except this time he'll be using it for marginally less pointless reasons.

In Breakfast at Tiffany's, all scenes featuring Mickey Rooney's yellowface could be re-edited, with the video replaced by an intern shaking a picture of Takeshi Kaneshiro, freshly torn from a Japanese fashion magazine, at the camera.

Disney's Song of the South: Digitally insert a shirtless Shemar Moore into every scene.

Maybe now Disney will let this one out of the vault!

In 300, you could find some sexy Persian and... really, 300 has reached ab saturation, and any attempt to add more attractive men would not only leave the movie as anti-Iranian as ever, but also cause some kind of rift in the space-time continuum, creating a wormhole which smells strongly of body oil.

Paperback Hater: My Reply to Emily Keeler

Have book covers become too pretty? Look at books like The Eat-Clean Diet: Fast Fat-loss That Lasts Forever! and you might say no, but that doesn't stop Emily Keeler from saying yes in a recent article for the Toronto Standard. Two series in particular are too sexy for her bookshelf: Jillian Tamaki's Threads collection, and Coralie Bickford-Smith's redesigned Fitzgeralds, both produced for Penguin. I read the article reluctantly, ready to be offended. If you're a longtime reader of my blog (I think there may be six of you by now!) you probably know that I like book covers. I like them a lot. I'll point out ones I think are particularly pretty on a semi-regular basis, and Bickford-Smith's work has appeared twice. So I tried to strain the petty bitterness out of any meaningful critique I could offer on Keeler's piece, but by the end my most coherent thought was still "GIRL, PLEASE." Time has cooled my ire, though, and allowed me to expand on that emotion.

My first issue is Keeler's apparent belief that the book as design object, or even a marker of taste, dates to Penguin hiring Tamaki. But the book as fetish object has a longer history than the book as utilitarian good. The latter needed several factors to appear and collide for it to become a phenomenon. Mass production, greater literacy and more disposable income, among others. Before, people who learned to read, then found time to do so regularly were generally either religious or rather rich. Sometimes, they even farmed out the pages to professional bookbinders, who returned beautifully tooled and gilded pieces of art. This process persisted even past the automation of bookbinding. If Keeler believes The Last Tycoon is overdesigned, she may want to avert her eyes from this pyrotechnic book cover, circa 1900. And when it comes to taste, as Bourdieu said, "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." He also said this in 1984, 27 years before the "beautiful books" which Keeler sees as becoming "consumable objects that describe the taste of the reader who proudly, tastefully, displays them" were getting laid out in InDesign.

I'm also not sure that "The lush redesigns fetishize these books, render them décor rather than literature." Do they? Really? Are publishers the new authors, back when it was assumed that the author packed meaning into the text, which readers then decoded to find the One True Interpretation? A company may say a book's collectible in the copy, but that doesn't guarantee that it will never be read. Books are multi-functional that way. They'll always be "literature" if they can be opened, contain words, and if you're not using the highest-browed meaning of the term. The only guaranteed way of turning books from literature to décor is to strip the covers and sew the pages together in a stack, which is exactly what Restoration Hardware did in 2010, but isn't what Penguin did here. Michael Maranda might know a little something about décor though. Keeler likes his work on Selected Business Correspondence, where a "whole sheaf of letters is bound and placed in an embossed manilla folder." That sounds like an object guaranteed to become décor, if only because once you've spent $40 on it, you'll want to limit your chances of bending the letters or tearing the envelope as you stuff them back in. Perhaps it's better just to click through the free PDF online.

For the record, each of the Fitzgerald redesigns costs less than $30, and all of them will survive a few readings out here in the physical world.

RIP Whitney Houston

As I'm sure Twitter/Facebook/news crawls have informed you, Whitney Houston died today. And so I'm drinking while watching her sing "I Have Nothing" over and over again. Why the sadness? Whitney was a joke for most of my life. The infamous Barbara Walters interview aired when I was 15, and I was raised to despise oversung, overproduced R and B. But when I heard Whitney's songs, they cut through all of my pretension, and even through her own melodramatic production. That voice had a direct line to my soul. Maybe not the best parts of me, but at least to every cell that cried too much, or fell in love with the wrong guy, or wanted to dance with somebody (when the loneliness calls.) It's powerful and sad, running almost to excess. That's not a criticism. That's the whole point.

Domestic Lateday: Mustard Hat, Rousse Beer

Yes, many days have passed since my last post, and it's only now that I've managed to get the crochet hook out and finish putting on my Thorpe's border. I have no excuse. Oh wait, I gave blood, which would only really explain about an hour and a half of yesterday's procrastination, but never mind. I'm going to ride that excuse for months. "Oh, you're mad that I'm late? Well, I was too busy saving people with the GIFT OF LIFE." And then that person will probably be a paramedic, and I will feel like an asshole. The hat keeps my head warm, but it also makes my face look particularly moony. As with my Habs toque, I have to make sure to have a curl of my hair out for show, so that everybody knows I'm a lady. It's the tonsorial equivalent of putting a bow on the head of a girl baby.

This week's beer came down from Baysville, ON - cottage country - to spend its last days in the far-less scenic Toronto country of my fridge. It's Lake of Bays Brewing's Rousse Red Ale. I had a vague recollection of drinking Boréale Rousse by the pitcher at McGill, but at those quantities, I could have been drinking Colt .45 and still only remembered that it tasted like drunk. So I'm not entirely sure how this compares to the so-called "Québec classic" rousse. As far as I can gather, anyway, that's a style based more or less on an Irish red ale, perhaps even popularized by that same Boréale which caused me so many regrets throughout my undergrad. This one is a fine outing in its class, I suppose, a good choice to buy for any friends you're trying to wean off their 50. Kind of malty, a little spicy, but less hoppy than the packaging had lead me to expect. I hate to sound so equivocal about this beer, but maybe I'm spoiled for subtler flavours. Or perhaps I'm just disappointed because I liked their Mocha Porter so very much.

Domestic Super Bowl Sunday: Hats and Beer to Stay Warm

Somehow, both of my handknit hats have disappeared over the past few weeks. I had been reduced to wearing either a black polar fleece hat with a ridiculous tassle... or a black polar fleece hat with a ridiculous Andean brim. Both were so tragic I braved frostbite rather than wear them. Then I remembered that I knew how to knit, so I could solve the problem without a trip to the mall with my debit card. It could be solved with a trip to the yarn store. With my credit card. Completely different. Definitely more respectable. One hilariously oversized ball (250g!!!) of Cascade's Eco Wool later, we almost have an earflap hat, knit according to the Thorpe pattern. Tassels and border to come.

And now, the beer. This week's option is Grand River Brewing's Russian Gun Imperial Stout. I'm drinking this against my better judgment, following a Beerfest at the Danforth's Only Café. I tried way too many beers there, including at least one other imperial stout (from Nickel Brook, if memory serves.) Imperial stouts have one of the more convoluted origin stories in beer-dom. It's a style originally brewed by a British brewery for export to the Russian court of the Prussian-born Catherine the Great. So, they're only a fraction as Russian as those clever craft brew names would have you think. But brewers are only human, and nobody can resist a good Communist pun. Imperial stouts are usually dark, rich and high in alcohol. This one is all that, with a taste like molasses and a hint of something smoky, like charcoal. It's a beer you could survive on, whether that means getting to the weekend or reading to the end of The Brothers Karamazov.

Haywire: Punch, Kick, Choke - Repeat!

Does Haywire welcome Gina Carano to the illustrious pantheon of Van Damme, Norris and Segal, or is it just The Girlfriend Experience with fists? Carano, an ex-MMA fighter and American Gladiatrix, is Mallory Kane, a highly competent private contractor. And as anyone who's seen an action movie in the past forty years, or even read the news, knows what happens to the competent. They get set up. So, from the opening scene, when Mallory sits down in a roadside diner, we know things will go wrong. Coffee cups will be smashed. Arms will be broken. And more, as Mallory choke-holds her way to the truth. This involves tenderizing such illustrious co-stars as Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum and Antonio Banderas. Carano might not be able to match their acting. The further out she is from imminent physical contact, the flatter her vocal delivery becomes, until she starts to sound like Sasha Grey. But she tops them in the action. Soderbergh keeps the camera fairly steady during all of the fights, so the chain of cause and effect between motion and outcome is always clear, and the natural ability of Carano's body can be appreciated. It's worth it for those scenes, even if the story seems slight and the retro-genre-fantastic score overstates the case.

A few random notes: First, I appreciated the scene where Mallory took off her ridiculous formal heels in order to fight. Second, I didn't realize how few actresses this movie had, apart from its female star, until I started to list her co-stars. Apart from some random extras in some scenes, Mallory/Gina Carano is the only woman in this movie. She works with men, under a man, who is hired by two other men. She hijacks a car from a male hostage, and she has no mother, just a father. Perhaps the key to all this is what her boss says in an important scene - that it would be a mistake to think of Mallory as a woman. Whatever her sex, the movie shows a world in which she's somehow gendered as male, for all of her conventional female attractiveness. Finally, in a post on Haywire's trailer, a friend told me that Gina Carano is the Danica Patrick of the MMA world. Ouch. I'll concede that she may be. After all, I don't watch MMA and won't start until either the end times come or I start caring about baseball. However, even if she's not the most-skilled fighter out there, she still seems strong enough, flexible enough and muscular enough to do what she does in this movie.