In the past two and a half years since my novel Up in Ontario was published by Turnstone Press, I've received a number of email responses from readers. In the digital housekeeping that's been a top priority of late around here, I've come across a number of them. And I admit, I find them incredible. I've written a book and put it out there into the world and people have read it and are writing back. I shake my head. Incredible.
So without further adornment, I've compiled the feedback I've received from readers of Up in Ontario.
I'm a 72-year old husband and parent who bought, read, and thoroughly enjoyed your moving novel. In my relationships with my two sons, your book has given me some deep matters to ponder.-- RT
...
Hello:Loved your book. My daughter took it out for me to read from the library. The reason? She said you know the area. My parents were born in Fort Frances and I have relatives living in Kenora and Winnipeg. I too spent many summers at the lake. I had been away and returned last year to visit my grandmother, 96 in a nursing home.
The familiar places really touched my heart as did the story of how we evolve from being kids to having kids and watching them grow and the choices we all make. I truly enjoyed the read.
thank you.-- SM
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James Sherrett's "Up in Ontario" is SUCH a lovely book, a first novel, and an absolutely captivating one. Read it. You'll love it. Even if you aren't familiar with the territory, you will relate to the people....
Yes, we went out and bought a copy of your book Friday evening. My boyfriend, born and bred in Kenora, could not put it down all weekend and has finished it! Taking in mind that it is a novel, and not necessarily accurate, he really enjoyed it. My turn!
-- DG
If you'd like to buy a copy of Up in Ontario, please let me know. For the next little while I'm offering a 2 for 1 sale: buy 1 copy of Up in Ontario and I'll press 2 copies on you (signed if you like).
I'm also interested in continuing to send out review copies. So if you'd like to review Up in Ontario on your website, or add it to your book club's reading list, let me know by email at james[at]upinontario.com.
Last night we travelled into new territory: slow cooking. I've done stews and stocks before, so I'm no stranger to good smells filling the apartment and halls for long hours on end. But I'd never saddled up to something so close to the germ of barbecue culture. I'd never attempted a beef brisket.
But I'd bought one - a beauty from the Blue Goose Cattle Company retail outlet on the north shore. Now I needed to find out how to cook it to perfection. So I turned to the Internet and found that almost all the recipes out there called for similar ingredients and a similar process. Therefore, the recipe I'm about the lay down for you is not prescriptive. Rather, it's a starting point. It worked for me once and should probably work for you. But I encourage improvisation because in taking some risks new discoveries are made.
Last summer when cherries from the Okanagan were in season we had a load of cherries in the fridge and they weren't getting eaten fast enough. As anyone who has eaten too many cherries knows, you don't want to eat too many cherries, especially if you have somewhere to go beyond your front door. The effects of too many cherries can be vigourous, to say the least. Anyway, I pitted the cherries in the sink and then stewed the beautiful juicy meat in a large saucepan. I added some bourbon and some maple syrup, spices like pepper, onion salt and garlic salt, and reduced them for about 20 to 30 minutes. The cherries broke down and formed the most beautiful, glossy barbecue sauce imaginable. On barbecued pork ribs they made for a meal that some people still talk about with a certain reverence.
But that was then and this is now. Onwards to the brisket!
Broke-Down Barbecue Beef Brisket
Before you start, make sure you have enough time to do this recipe. There's about half an hour of prep, a day of marinading (recommended) and then seven and a half hours of leisurely cook time. If you want to serve brisket for dinner you need to start your recipe 24 hours ahead and your cooking before noon, unless you plan a fashionably late dinner (LD). Naturally? Alrightee.
Place your brisket in a large non-reactive roasting pan. I used a 9" x 16" pyrex glass pan that fit my brisket like a glove. Let the meat warm up for about half an hour on the countertop. Cover it if you like, of if anyone else in the kitchen likes you to.
The Marinade
In a measuring cup, or another good liquid-holding container, add:
I'd recommend a ratio of 1 part Worcestershire to 1 part liquid smoke to 2 parts soya sauce, depending on how smoky tasting you like it. Mix the ingredients and pour them over your brisket. Using your hands, rub the marinade into the brisket. Make sure you get it evenly into the meat, then flip the brisket over and get the marinade into the other side. Be careful when flipping the meat that you don't splash the marinade all over the counter, like I did.
Now season the beast. I used coarse-ground black pepper, garlic salt and onion salt. You might also try some seasoning salt (Hy's, if you please) or Montreal steak seasoning. Then I added some fresh thyme leaves and rubbed the spices into the meat on both sides. Go lighter on the seasoning on the second side because it will sit on the meat and not dilute in the marinade.
All done? Good, now put the brisket in the fridge for as long as you can (up to 2 days).
The Cooking
Take your pan and brisket out of the fridge. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C). When she's ready to go, flip the brisket in the pan so the marinade has both sides moist. Then make sure you have the fattier side up. Cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil, shiny side in. Make sure you've got your rack in the middle of the oven. Got it there? Great, now slide the brisket in and close the door.
Soon your place will smell so good you might not be able to stand it. If this is so, go for a walk, run some errands. This baby will be cooking for six (6!) hours. Don't peak at it, don't worry it while it's cooking. Just leave it be. Good, good things are happening and you just have to be patient and trust them.
The Finisher
It's six hours after you started to cook your brisket, so don your oven mitts and grab that baby with both hands. Place it somewhere to cool. Lift off the aluminum foil (careful of the heat and the steam and see what you hath wrought. The strips on the meat will be clearly separating, falling apart, in fact, and the meat will be fork tender. Be careful with it.
Now you want to move the brisket onto a cutting board to rest it while you get ready to finish the sauce. But the meat really is ready to fall apart, and it will fall apart if you try to move it quickly or without enough support. Be ready for this and either lift it in multiple places with a few wide spatulas, or press it apart and move it in a few piece.
Once you've got the brisket resting on the cutting board, preferably with a fat drain, have a look at what's left in the cooking pan. Any solid bits can be placed on the cutting board with the brisket. Pour the rest of the juices into a saucepot, making sure to scrape all the gorgeous browned bits sticking to the sides. Place the roasting pan aside, you'll need it later. Oh, and jack the heat on the over up to 400 degrees F.
This is a good time to open some wine, Take the cork out, pour one glass and have yourself a sip. Your guests will thank you for letting the wine breathe and you'll have a glass of wine going. Hurrah.
Okay, now the fat in the juice from the pan will have risen to the top of the saucepot. Tilt the saucepot and skim off the fat with a spoon. You can reserve this for later (for use with other roasts, or for adding to roasting vegetable and making the world a better place), because it's the kind of goodness and love that you know you crave. Or you can discard it.
Now place the saucepot with the skimmed juice over a suitable element on low-to-mid heat. Add:
Use your own judgement on the spice amounts, you know how much you like. Pump up the heat to medium and bring to a bubble. Stir occasionally, reducing the sauce for about 15 minutes. While it's reducing, tend to your brisket.
I like to press the meat apart and have it stay in long, thin strips. Some people find this difficult and cut their brisket. Do what you like, but if you cut, please cut across the grain of the meat. When you've got it all broken down in a heap, return it to the roasting pan. Any juices on the cutting board, mix them back into the saucepot that's bubbling away. You might even sneak a taste of the brisket or the sauce now to get a promise of what's to come. Oh lordy.
Lay out the broke-down brisket in the roasting pan. When your barbecue sauce has reached a desired level of thickness, pour it evenly over the meat. Shake the roasting pan a little and make sure the brisket is nicely coated but not swimming in sauce. Slide it onto the same rack in the middle of the over for 10 minutes of finishing at 400 degrees F. The sauce will bake on the strands of brisket and happiness will ensue.
Deliver the steaming brisket, fresh from the oven, to plates. Recommended side dishes include baked Yukon gold potatoes, green salad and steamed asparagus. Any left over brisket will create revolutionary sandwiches. Left over baked potatoes should be sliced and pan fried with a spoon of the skimmed beef fat.
Thanks to the lovely and smart Monique I now know a little more about the SFU Summer New Media Workshops that are coming up this summer, July 31 to August 2. I'll also 'fess up and tell you that I'll be speaking on Day 4: Getting the Money to Flow, though my bio has appeared yet.
Now that you know I'm biased, I'll press on.
I know a number of the other presenters at the workshops, and if you're looking for some great sessions to learn about new media, the web and what's going on in this crazy networked world, the workshops will be a great chance to learn and participate. The folks leading the sessions live and breathe the web and will be great resources. Some of them presented at the recent Northern Voice conference and a number of others attended as partcipants. I know, I paid to be there to watch the whole thing go down.
So if you're looking for an opportunity to hang out and learn with some of the leading webby geeks in Vancouver, I recommend the SFU Summer New Media Workshops. And if you or the company you represent have a budget for education / career development, I can't think of a better opportunity to turn those allocated dollars into excellent learnings. The days are structured so you can concentrate on a particular area of expertise, or attend for the duration to get the grand sweep of the web.
If you have any questions about the workshops, let me know either in the comments of this post or by email and I'll see what I can do to get them answered. Hope to see you there!
On Monday I returned home from a turn about the neighbourhood on some errands. Only as I approached our building and saw my reflection in the front door did I realize that I may have achieved a personal zenith of hoserdom. In one hand, I carried a two-four of beer, freshly caught from the icy climes of the beer store cooler. In the other hand, I held a hockey stick balanced on my shoulder, with two rolls of tape around the shaft and my hockey skates hooked through the blade holders. I wore a toque, not quite Bob and Doug vintage, but old skool. All that was missing was a Mackinaw jacket, its trademark red-and-black checked pattern alerting all to the quality of man within. In Winnipeg we called it the Transcona Dinner Jacket.
Could this magical hoser appearance herald the turning point in our Canadian men's hockey team's struggle at the Olympics? They have looked slow, disorganized, dim and unfocused, not at all like champions. Today it continued and they lost to Russia, 2-0. Martin Brodeur, their goaltender, gave them every chance to win the game, which is what you ask for from your goalie, but no one amongst the skaters led, no one surpassed the level of play on the ice and turned the game to the Canadian favour.
These winter Olympics have certainly heralded one thing: the emergence of Canadian women's sports. Women have led the way. In fact, if the men's hockey team played with the cohesiveness, relentlessness and desire to win that the women's hockey team played with, I think we would be looking at a semifinal rematch with Finland. Instead of playing for seventh place.
They do play for seventh place, don't they?
Monique has posted some great photos on Flickr that she took while we walked along the shore on Sunday in Vancouver.
At the same time, herself and I have invented / claimed a tag, Monique+James or MoniqueJames, on Flickr for our photos. If you'd like to know when either of us post photos, subscribe to the public feed for MoniqueJames (at the bottom of the page) and you'll be updated. Oh, and if you have photos of both of us you can tag them MoniqueJames too and they'll be included in the group. Awesome.
Coming at this from a roundabout way: I'll admit with some hesitation that I'm not a webstats maniac. I like to check them once in a while to see what's happening, what people are searching for and finding on upinontario.com and what posts to this blog are more popular than others.
This month, February, is the first in a long time that 'orangutan' is not the most popular search query to send traffic to Up in Ontario. Leah McLaren has ascended to become the new champ, and that, along with a flurry of additional hits to the sensory lobe, have predicated this post on herself, the haircut with a pen. I wrote a post almost two years ago now that is the number one hit in Google for the search phrase Leah McLaren: Leah McLaren Redux.
But let's get something out of the way right now. I'm not going join the pile on to slag McLaren. Sure her column in the Globe and Mail is sometimes / reliably inane. Sometimes it's about the strife her toenails have endured. She plays up her ditzy persona, immersed in the dumb washcycle of consumerism and media, and others have pointed out that her name rhymes with intellectually barren, but I think she's smarter than all that. In some ways she is to Canadian columnists as Belinda Stronach is to MPs. She's pretty so she can't be smart. Her success came too fast for her to have earned it. She's getting attention that she doesn't deserve. Cut her down!
And she's got a new book out - the perfect opportunity for anyone with an axe (or ex) to grind to crawl out of the shadows and take a swing. The Continuity Girl is the novel she's been working on for a few years, and it's received some mixed reviews. Let's recap the coverage that's reached us here on the left coast:
All I know is that I don't like the cover of The Continuity Girl and I wish McLaren good luck with it. Writing the book is hard, getting people to notice harder, making a living writing novels in Canada, hardest of all.
The Quill & Quire blog also has excellent coverage of the Bigge McLaren affair, I discovered to my chagrin when I searched for 'lurpers' and discovered that it has only been used in the McLaren article, along with Alex Good who weighs in to say that the bad review wasn't even a good bad review.
I just discovered The Onion Podcast. Go, download it. Light it up in your iTunes subscriptions. Do what you have to do, just make sure to get it in ya.
My personal favourite? The Letter D Pulls Sponsorship from Sesame Street. Genius!
Volkswagon is set to launch the latest version of its pocket rocket GTI and has created a site to customized your GTI. Now many car companies have 'build-your-dream-X-then-buy-it' sites. Nothing new to that concept. But what I like about the VW site is that after you build your GTI you get to drive it, with all the options you specified, and with a suitably racy fraulein. Give it a try and see if it revs your engine.
On a sidenote, the GTI is one of those products in my realm of possibility that I've never really fallen for. I'm interested, but not convinced. I like the sportiness and the deutchekraft engineering, but the price has always seemed too steep for a souped up Golf and they don't seem very reliable.
On another sidenote, Volkswagon has engineered one of the most significant reworks of meaning in corporate branding history. The company, fueled by Hitler to create the 'people's automobile,' has become an entry-level prestige, yuppie mark. In Vancouver the Jetta is clearly the auto of choice for the upwardly mobile, professional, beautiful baby. Sadly the Beetle can only be driven by gay men, aging ladies travelling between personal trainer appointments, the spa and lunch dates and auditioning sororiety girls exercising daddy's money. Little dogs optionally complete the stereotype.
Don't hate me if I'm right or beautiful.
Tom Flanagan has made his career as an apologist for the powerful. He is best known as a founder of what has become known as the Calgary School of political science, for his writings dismissing the entitlements of native people and for his books on Louis Riel, who he repeatedly has tried to recast as a religious zealot. He finds himself much in demand as an expert witness on native land claims because his scholarship bolsters the cases of federal and provincial governments looking to avoid or minimize any settlements or payouts. In ancient Greece he would have been called a sophist and in the courts of the renaissance he would have been a coutiere: the man who whispers in the ear of the man with power.
He is also, as Marni McDonald writes in an excellent article from The Walrus (!), The Man Behind Stephen Harper.
Certainly, by last June there was no lack of opinion that Flanagan's own writings were controversial, if not right off the mainstream map. As the Conservatives' campaign director, he seemed perfect fodder for the sort of Liberal attack ads already depicting Stephen Harper as a scary extremist with a hidden agenda. The mystery is why Paul Martin's admen didn't jump on that tailor-made target.Rick Anderson, who has worked with both Harper and Flanagan in the Reform Party, has no doubts. "I'd be astounded if it were otherwise," he says. "They're intellectual soulmates, philosophical soulmates."
Some great sections of McDonald's article highlight how Harper spent time with the National Citizens' Coalition (motto: 'More freedom through less government.') and his jockeying for power in the Reform Party, utilizing the ethics and patterns espoused in a book called Chimpanzee Politics, 'A study of the world's largest captive chimp colony at a Netherlands zoo, it chronicles the scheming, coups, and ultimate murder of the would-be alpha male, Liut.' Woot, woot indeed.
Just in case you ever wondered, as some of you out there must surely have, people have been polled to find the Hottest Canadian MP. To not just jump straight to the winner, start with the Sweet 16. Of course, Ken Dryden was automatically eliminated because of the sheer weight of nostalgia.
What? No Pierre Pettigrew!
Note to self: who knew about them Conservatives? Not many women, but they sure did pick pretty ones.
Yesterday we joined all the louts in north america and watched the Super Bowl. On the table in front of us (between the bowls, the cans, the glasses and the plates) we placed an abicus to count the frequency of the most offensive ads. In the end it was no contest.
Worst offender? Not the gawd awful Canadian Tire guy, the nerds buying big screen TVs at Future Shop or an idea that was spoofed before it made it to market, the 5-blade razor. Global itself. They advertised for themselves 43 times that we counted. And it's not like they were good or interesting or entertaining ads. No, they were crap crap crap ads for their other crap crap crap shows. If I have ever seen at once a case of what television can do very well - produce live events and beam them to millions of people at once - and very poorly - shill itself to death so that the horseshit around the event you intend to watch is hardly worth bearing to watch the event - then watching the Super Bowl was it.
As a group we developed an active loathing for the precious faux-sincere smile of their news anchor, who, they promised, would provide clarity to our complicated world. Nice. Reductivist reporting and wire stories approved from the Asper living room. Patronize the intelligence of your audience then tell them you have their solution. One big F-sharp all around.
Incidentally, did anyone else notice that the Seahawks got hosed on calls? At the risk of sounding overly conspiracy-aware, I think the major factors deciding the game were the calls of the officials. One Seattle touchdown called back, another first and goal called back, one dicey Pittsburgh touchdown called in and a littering of other marginal penalties - holding, illegal block below the waist, holding and holding again - and the results of the game hinged more on the discretion of the zebras than on the dominance of one team or another. Oh, and Seattle's tight end Stevens caught 1 of the 5 passes that he should have.
I have yet to see any sports reporter willing to say that the game was decided by the referees. They all natter on in the same tired platitudes about the Bus retiring, the gadget plays (can't they come up with a better description? Use some imagination! How about the Scrambled Eggs Reverse Pitch Pass?), the Steelers 5-and-one in Super Bowls. No wonder the sports pages are so skimmable. The good stories never get covered.
A few years ago when we bought our iPod we also bought a car adapter / FM transmitter unit so we could play tunes from the little Pod in the car. Whenever we went anywhere on road trips we had almost our whole music collection with us. Rock on.
The FM transmitter was the coolest part because of the setup because we could broadcast (within a limited range) on any FM frequency we wanted. We had become micro-pirate radio DJs. Sure we only did it in our apartment and our car, and sure is was hard for cars traveling beside us to pick up the signal for very long (We tried all kinds of different stations and distances and maxed out about 40 feet on a really low band - 88.1 or something. Hey, what else are you going to do between Medicine Hat and Regina?), but if someone with some electrical engineering know-how got ahold of that technology, they could have done some very cool things with it.
Now I've come across Roadcasting, which seems to amount to the system we had conceived on our road trips, but on a way grander scale, with auto-detect software that, like, totally turbocharges the experience of discovery. Everybody becomes their own micro DJ, broadcasting their playlist into the wireless cloud around them and receiving songs from others at the same time. If only I could listen to multiple songs at once!
The concept looks to be established but not yet picked up by anyone with any clout. They've received some glowy coverage from leading nerdlinger publishers but no commercial offers. And I don't know if they will - the whole concept seems pretty threatening to established media players and too geeky for the scale demanded by car manufacturers. But maybe it'll emerge organically as another component of the everyone's-a-producer-and-everyone's-a-consumer-all-the-time paradigm.
Also, apparently, Canadians are the number one file sharers in the world. Who knew? Good on us.
The problem with everyone publishing to the web is that there is now never enough time to get through all the really great writing out there. Case in point: purse lip square jaw the blog of Anne Galloway, a graduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, and a collector and interpreter of some of the most interesting stories online.
Her latest post to really get me is a pointer to an essay by Felix Stalder, entitled The Stuff of Culture, and it is the best single articulation I've read of the changes currently roiling our culture; why everything seems so influxish and unsettled and insecure. If you're interested in how digital technology changes our world and the sense we can and do make of it, then just go, read it, now.
And the essay is not just for nerdlingers either. It's for anyone who wants to understand how our present fits into a larger historical context of cultural remembrance. We're all part of culture - passive or active, unconscious or conscious.
Historically, there have been two different approaches to culture. One approach to culture would be to characterize it as object-oriented, the other as exchange-oriented. The first treats culture as made out of discrete objects, existing more or less independently from one another, like chairs around a table, or books on a shelf. While such things can be arranged in relation to one another, their meaning and function remains the same regardless. One person can sit on one chair, no matter how many chairs there are in a room, or how they are arranged. The content of a book does not change when re-shelving it. The other view takes culture to be made out of continuous processes, in which one act feeds into the other, in an unbroken chain....
The two perspectives create different sets of concepts for understanding culture: the timeless work of art versus the process of creation, the individual inventor versus the scientific community, the statement versus the conversation, the recording versus the live performance, and so on. These two perspectives, and the practices through which they are expressed, are currently coming into deep conflict with one another, hence the new urgency to the question: what is culture made out of?
Now, I don't agree with everything Stalder says, especially the reductive this (object-oriented) versus that (exchange-oriented) diagram of culture. But I think it provides a very effective frame for a discussion of what kind of culture we want and what kind of interactions we want to have. The essay is long to read online, and some of the concepts aren't as readily apparent as sunshine on first reading, but to work at them is worth it, in this one writer's opinion.
So go, read, then come back, discuss, please.
Jayzuz, do you know about the CBC Radio 3 Podcast? Intermittently when I have the chance, I've been all over it, like rice on white. I just finished listening to episode #32 from December 30th, last year, for the second time. Episode #32 is a Best Of episode that host Grant Lawrence got to program all for hisself; his favourite 14 songs of 2005. And it's good, very good. Oh fudge it's good (but I didn't say fudge).
Visit the CBC Radio 3 website to get all the backissues of the podcast and to subscribe to the new hits. Ooo, and they also have a blog with pointers to keen stories of Canadian culture.