August

There's this folk tale I haven't been able to find online, that I remember my mom telling me as a child (and she remembers the gist of it, too, as well as my brother remembering having heard it before). It's the story of why the sparrow hops. I don't know the set-up, unfortunately, but here's the bare bones of it: the king summoned all of his subjects (or perhaps it was only the sparrow? this detail is a bit fuzzy) and the sparrow refused to bow/kowtow to the king, and so the king inflicted punishment upon the sparrow for its impertinence by forcing it to hop for the rest of its days (apparently the sparrow looks like it's constantly kowtowing with every hop it makes). Except I've got a couple questions:

• Was this just the king of birds, or was it the Emperor?
• Why did the sparrow refuse to bow or kowtow? Was it a pride thing?
• In the other two versions my friend, who can actually read & write/type in Chinese characters, found on Google, the sparrow's legs are actually chained. Were there chains in this version as well?
• The other two versions are as follows:
1. A sparrow killed & ate the pigeon's 3 offspring, and so the pigeon went to tell the King of Birds of the heinous deed. The King called the sparrow to court and the sparrow confessed its crime. The punishment meted out to the sparrow was to have its legs chained so it must hop for all time.
2. The sparrow, which loves to eat grain, once ate the grain set aside as offerings for the gods. The gods, who were angered by its disrespect, punished it for this transgression by binding its feet in chains.

It's times like these that I think it would be great had I paid a bit more attention in my Chinese school lessons back in elementary school, because I couldn't find anything about the folklore using English search terms, but these popped up relatively quickly once my friend at work searched it up in Chinese.

1. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li
• A collection of short stories, these were strangely reminiscent of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and Other Stories that I read earlier. It's certainly a different sort of uncanny feeling you get from both authors, but it might be because both of them distill elements and details that focus less on presenting the full picture, instead almost creating the effect of being in someone's consciousness as they turn their attention to one thing, then the other and accompanying their sudden jumps in their thoughts. These short stories are halfway between what one might expect of a full novel, or a novella, and fairytales or myths, in a sense. They have the "stock" characters that you expect once the tone is established for the rest of the book, yet these characters are far from stock characters, idiosyncratic as they are. There is this pervasive understanding throughout all of the stories that we can never fully understand the full intentions and motivations of anyone else, and that of course relationships can never be as pure and beautiful as they may be portrayed in fiction, nor people as comprehensible as we wish they would be.
2. Birds by Jeffrey Fisher, illustrated by Christine Fisher
• I didn't realize the parliament of rooks actually had some kind of logic to it: apparently rooks occasionally form a circle around one or two other rooks, appear to deliberate as to what to do with them, before either deciding to pardon one (or both) or to peck them to death. Whoa.
3. The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking
• Not mind-blowing, but I did like it. I also quite enjoyed the size of the book, the colour palette, the photos, the illustrations - it was well designed (unsurprisingly, considering this is a book about hygge and the Danes).
4. Prestige (2006)
• I really wish Nolan didn't introduce the completely magical component (ironically the one "true" thing on stage that happens in the movie) - the film would have been so much better if there was some way to make everything actually fantastic magic tricks. I guess I just wish these two men could be outsmarting one another all the way through without resorting to fictional inventions, just pulling trick after trick from up their sleeves.
5. The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Contentment, Comfort, and Connection by Louisa Thomsen Brits
• This presented as one big list of "hygge is....", split up into a few chapters that could be called themes, but that are in fact simply one big repetitive list. I'm not saying it's bad... per se - it simply isn't my cup of tea.
6. The Call by Peadar Ó Guilín
• Surprisingly good! I was gripped throughout most of the story. Apparently there's going to be a sequel released sometime next year, so I'm looking forward to seeing how Nessa & Anton play their parts in helping to eradicate The Call altogether. I was just thinking that there didn't seem to be much in terms of closure for the plot, in the issue of those who had made deals with the Sídhe didn't really get wrapped up, so thank goodness there's going to be a sequel. Some of the characters died before you really got to know and care about them, and to an extent, even when Megan died, it wasn't heart wrenching. There's also quite a bit of violence and gore, both implied and described, which is expected but also not. It's kind of like it's darker than I would have expected, but not in a perverse way where every bloody detail gets described in full.
• A couple of shout outs:
• Protagonist with disability that still kicks ass with her resourcefulness and physical strength
• Non-heterosexual characters: one of the mothers of one of the children, I forget who, who happens to love and live with a woman (but does and still does love the man she left); Aoife & Emma; possibly Megan
• Most of the characters, while not fully developed and endowed with flaws and weaknesses, are round characters
7. How to Hygge: The Nordic Secrets to a Happy Life by Signe Johansen
• A good chunk of the pages are dedicated to recipes, running the gamut from fika treats (think cardamom twists and a mouthwatering-looking sour cherry bundt cake) to every part of a meal, including sandwiches (featuring an ultimate grilled cheese), salads, mains, and a few boozy concoctions for every season. Johansen takes a slightly different approach to hygge, focusing more on the outdoors activity - living an active life in general - rather than the comfort and coziness of home and the conviviality of a gathering. She's also pretty upfront about hygge not being a shortcut to a happy life: "to a certain extent, you have to earn it" (p.7), which I quite appreciate.
• Where the other two books on hygge focused more on the getting together part of hygge, and trying to define what exactly hygge itself is and isolate it in order to figure out what it is, Johansen covered a lot more ground, I think, and in doing so, provides a more realistic look at what Nordic inhabitants are doing well in order to live lives that are hygge. What I appreciated most about her approach, I think, is that she makes no secret of the fact that you can't just make your home a certain way using dimmer lights, or by lighting candles, and indulging in everything you'd like throughout the week, and not change your general outlook or perspective, and expect that to bring hygge: it actually takes effort to achieve (as I noted above).
• Here are the main points I remember, without looking at the summary that Johansen provides at the end:
• Enjoy the great outdoors, or at least get out of the house when you can, regardless of the weather
• Exercise - outdoors if possible
• Don't do it in order to get to a certain body shape, so much as in order to enjoy yourself
• Cleanliness
• All things in moderation, but indulge yourself
• In the same vein, eat well and don't go for fad diets
• Be present with other people, especially during meals
• Take your time and enjoy the meal, rather than rushing through it
• Enjoy the social aspect of it also
• Surround yourself with good design & lighting - doesn't have to be fancy or expensive, but it has to make you comfortable
• There are also a number of recipes featured in this book that I'd like to try out, such as the cardamom twists and the bundt cake, which I mentioned above, but the mains also look delicious!
8. Anomalisa (2015)
• I don't know that I agree with the summary of the plot here... or it may have been that I was under the impression that it was going to be about Michael not being able to see faces properly. Perhaps it's more that the "mundanity of his life" from which he escapes during those two days is simply represented by his seeing everyone as being the same person - and it's ironic that although he espouses seeing each customer as an individual, as each person in the audience is, he is unable to do so himself in any part of his life, except for that brief interlude with Lisa - but I was hoping for a discussion on prosopagnosia, which did not come up.
• The stop motion animation is beyond amazing! Just absolutely incredible! I'm completely blown by how smooth everything is, and there were times when I wondered whether it was stop motion at all because of how seamlessly everything flowed.
9. Hygge: The Danish Art of Happiness by Marie Tourell Søderberg
• Wow is that font ever tiny!
• The recipes included I wasn't super impressed with, though I did enjoy the photos throughout. I also quite enjoy the aesthetic, but it didn't really resonate with me as much as How to Hygge (above) did. The mystery snowflake poetry or letter tradition was really interesting, as well as learning about some of the different, more obscure, holidays or feast days, such as that for the last day of April. There was also a pronunciation guide, or rather instructions that teach you how to pronounce the enigmatic hygge, which was fun (and confirmed that I was pronouncing it correctly inside my head - I still have no idea whether I can actually say it the way I know it's said).
10. The Circle by Dave Eggers
• Very 1984, even in the way that it ends. Except Mae doesn't waver nearly as much once she has been converted, and it only takes periodic doses of two of the Wise Men telling her she's doing the right thing to get her back on track. There were a couple of typos, which were circled by someone who had borrowed the book before me, but apart from that it's written well. The insistence of Stenton & Bailey, and Mae's complacency, are a bit difficult to believe - especially on Mae's part - because there's less resistance than you might think in Mae, and I would have enjoyed a bit more of a twist or turn here and there, maybe? It's pretty easy to guess who Kalden is early on enough, and I wish he played a slightly bigger role, or was a bit more successful - to truly trick the audience into believing for a second that maybe Mae would side with him, because as it is, there's no doubt that Mae will turn on him - but it was fine.
• It's relatable, even if not quite to the extent that Mae takes it by becoming transparent in the novel, in that the fear of too much (personal) information being made available on the web, along with handing all the power over to one entity, even if it is a company, is a recipe for disaster. And while I don't think it's going to get to the point that the novel reaches, it's still an unsettling picture all the same.
• I'm wondering whether Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is like this as well?
11. Pantheon by Hamish Steele
12. Following (1998) by Christopher Nolan
• Going back and forth in time from frame to frame, it was a bit confusing to get straight when what happened, but this film certainly keeps you on your toes the entire time! I think this had a lot more draw to it than Prestige, personally.
13. The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia by Michael Booth
• I swear it's a coincidence that I've been reading a stack of hygge books, followed by a dystopian novel, then going on to this book seeking to debunk the utopian view of Scandinavian living. There's actually no connection - this was one of the books I picked up while making the Armchair Travel list months ago for work, of which Ice Diaries and The Shepherd's Life were a part, as well as The Bookshop on the Corner. See my reviews for those here in June.
• Part of me wants to think Booth is taking his witty repartee a bit far, but at the same time, he addresses the issues the hygge books inevitably bring up. And apparently the xenophobia extends beyond just hygge into the other Nordic countries as well. (Which gels with what a coworker friend of mine had told me about her experience of Denmark.) At times hilarious and always entertaining - though some of those chapter titles I'm not quite getting... such as Stockholm Syndrome when nothing of the sort takes place in that chapter - this is an interesting foray into debunking the myth of the utopia found in Scandinavian/Nordic countries.
• Booth does seem to have something against Sweden, and he readily admits that when faced with these seemingly perfect facades that are the Scandinavian reputations at first glance, there is certainly an urge to expose the dirty underbelly, and he says of himself that perhaps he hasn't resisted that urge as well as he perhaps should have or wanted to, but still - it's as though all the animosity the other Nordic countries have towards Sweden have been absorbed by Booth and he's simply out to expose them for their flaws and denial.
14. Death by Hanging (1968)
• I'm not sure how to talk about this film, in part because I'm not too knowledgeable as regards the treatment of Koreans living in Japan after WWII, as well as the horrors inflicted upon Korea by Japan during the war. By which I mean that I know an overview, from an art history course, but I also don't feel as though I'm in a position where I can make meaningful commentary about the movie and all that it, in turn, comments on.
• Of course, there's the theme of guilt, as well as of responsibility and personhood running through the entire film, but I can't really speak to much of it without doing further research, I don't think.
15. Out of the Depths: The Blue Whale Story at the ROM
• I went with a friend who is a bit squeamish, so we did skip the flensing video, but went through the rest of the exhibit and interacted with most of the stuff there (except for the video game). Personally, I don't think I really learned anything in particular from the exhibition, and the immensity of the full blue whale didn't really surprise me as much as maybe it should have - I do think the models in the Whales of Iceland exhibit were pretty close, if not, 1:1 - which is not to say that the exhibit was underwhelming! But I did get the feeling the target audience was probably families, especially those with younger children. Lots of interactive components, including a plastinated moose heart you could touch, as well as a photo booth section where you could dress up as krill and step into a whale's mouth (or at least the skeletal remains of its mouth, complete with baleen).
• A lot of the information was covered in the Whales of Iceland exhibit, which I actually enjoyed more overall, but I'm still glad I went to this one!
• There was also a very conspicuous smart car right beside the plastinated heart (for which they didn't really explain the process of plastination either, sadly, or that I could see), which was probably the most blatant advertising by a sponsor that I had ever seen in a ROM exhibit... ever. The car had heart-like vessel designs on it, but let's be real: it's nothing more than advertisement. My friend also noted how a lot of the information presented in the exhibit also led you to other organizations.
16. The Milliner's Daughter (Ydessa Hendeles) at the Power Plant
• WOW. That was probably my favourite show this year - maybe tied with work.wear, but definitely up there on the list!
• I'm getting lazy at this point, but here are some things I would talk about if I were to put the time into it (horrible, I know):
• Flat characters in fairytales, and the lack of individuality in collective groups, or the herd
• Are we playing roles in the tableaus Hendeles sets up? Which roles do we play, and how best should we approach them?
• Nietzsche?
• Also the amorality, or ambiguous moral lessons, present in less edited fairytales (I'm looking at Grimms' as highly touched up, so no, I don't just mean return to Grimms' original publications)
• Can we ring the working bicycle bell? We didn't, and it doesn't look like you should, but in truth are we allowed?
17. Legacies 150 at the Harbourfront Centre
• I really enjoyed the tablets on the table in the center of the gallery space where you could watch/scroll through each of the stories.
18. Quanta article: Interspecies Hybrids Play a Vital Role in Evolution
• So you mean convergent evolution doesn't explain everything? It might actually just be that they swapped DNA somewhere down the line?
19. Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? by Andrew Lawler
• I was reading this at the same time as I was reading Bird Sense (below), and had coincidentally just got to the Touch chapter of Bird Sense before reading the final few chapters of Why Did the Chicken Cross the World, where Lawler talks about how hens are debeaked... right after I had read about beaks being a sensitive sensory organ. A lot of the last third of this book was uncomfortable to read, but rightly so! The poultry industry drives invention to produce chickens that produce more meat or more eggs with less feed, and over a smaller span of time, to the detriment of the chickens themselves, whose very bone structures don't have time to grow before the meat packs on. Some of them can't even walk to their feed and water bowls because of how they have been bred to prioritize heftier chests that grow in some forty odd days. And their invisibility in everyday life - I get that banning backyard chickens is probably more out of fear of the diseases associated with fowl - makes it that much easier to turn a blind eye. I never realized that free-range, organic chickens don't necessarily have the time of their lives either, some having the same chance of seeing the light of day as their caged brethren. Which is to say: none.
• Because my parents do use Hmong chicken in their cooking, I am familiar with the black skin, flesh and bones that pops up in our soups every so often, and I do find that they taste different. While I'm pretty horrible at discerning different tastes - as an example, it took me a good two minutes or so to figure out the flavour of Jelly Belly I was eating the other day, despite its familiarity: black pepper - I think it's safe to say that it would really be quite a pity if we simply lost all the different types of chicken indigenous to different parts of the world, for we would be giving up a whole world of flavours (even without the consideration of genetic diversity and how that might help to produce chickens that will survive in their respective climes, outside of layers and cages).
• While I'm not about to purge poultry from my diet, I don't think that's exactly what Lawler had in mind either, so much as to force you to become more aware of the industry and thus have you make more informed choices. I like the idea of having a photo of the hens' living conditions on the egg cartons, so that consumers cannot simply turn away from the knowledge that the chickens aren't living a glamorous life. Besides providing a wonderful history of the chicken and its journey across the world, along with its role and significance in different times and different places, I think what Lawler managed to do spectacularly well is to not present as sermonizing about the chicken industry while at the same time giving a sobering account of it. Part of it is that he, and the people he interviews, are quite realistic about the situation: chickens are doomed. But the beauty of it is that people are still researching and doing their quixotic parts to help chickens for the sake of chickens - as Brisbin (who rescued wild Red Jungle Fowl from destruction in the 70s) says, it's "a way to say thank you" (p.264).

Still working on (and new ones):

1. Toppamono by Miyazaki Manabu
2. The Bird by Colin Tudge
• There's a lot of "more on this later", which gets a bit irritating after a while, to be honest, though I also do a fair bit of that in my own writing. Although it's good for those who might be interested in a specific topic, to see (see Chapter 4) or something along those lines, to know exactly where to skip to, for myself personally, if there was something I was looking for, I'd just go to the index or the table of contents, so all these internal "links" are distracting at best.
3. Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead
• I really like the way this is laid out, how Birkhead goes from some background history of our knowledge of bird senses and how it has changed over the years, and what appears to be a pattern of "we didn't know this until recently", coupled with personal anecdotes and many examples that illustrate the senses, from notable abnormalities (e.g. the use of echolocation by oilbirds and a certain swift) to common sense capabilities.
4. Beautiful Angiola translated by Jack Zipes
• Unfortunately, I had to return this before I finished reading all the tales, but I do enjoy the queens' roles in these! Ever so exasperated and rational - "Just give it up, son! She doesn't want you!" or "Leave the poor girl alone already! She's suffered enough!" - and ever so ignored. There's quite a bit more murder in these fairy and folk tales than in the Grimms, I think, in that they are glossed over much more perfunctorily. And the running theme of beauty being of utmost importance is readily apparent also. There's also the fact that some of these tales can be seen in both Grimms as well as in this collection, or at least they are similar enough (like the story of the fur skin, or the really dirty princess with the three beautiful dresses).