vol. 11: how to pay attention & nightingales/november ed ...
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” - Simone Weil
Hello books and breakfasters! It’s the end of November & beginning of the holiday season. For those who follow (or are interested, like me) in the Jewish calendar, we’re entering the month of Kislev, which is associated with sleep, dreams, and the colour blue-violet, and culminates in Chanukah, the festival of light.
The holiday season is a fun but busy time to be a singer. This month I’ve been busy with travel to Vancouver for an audition and conference, performing masterclasses for Graham Johnson and Berg’s Sieben Frühe Lieder in Montreal, and prepping for gigs as soloist in Handel’s Messiah in Toronto and Bach’s Advent Cantata and Handel’s Chandos Anthems in Ottawa (catch me on Ottawa’s Rogers Daytime TV on Friday talking about this concert!). Lots of hopping around the country, but after living in Europe for two and a half years, there is comfort in travelling to places that still feel like home and I love being immersed in such rich repertoire.
Here’s a tiny taste of a masterclass of me singing last week with the legendary Graham Johnson demonstrating how he thought the piano part should be played, working on Berg’s “Die Nachtigall” (“The Nightingale”) from his Seven Early Songs:
During my busy-ness, I’ve also managed to squeeze in some really nourishing time in nature, soak up amazing art, and have laughs and food with good friends/family. On a recent trip to Toronto, I spent an incredible afternoon at the Royal Ontario Museum, seeing their nature exhibits, dinosaurs, and Kent Monkman’s absolutely fantastic new paintings. Monkman is an Indigenous artist with a “shape-shifting, time-travelling, gender-fluid alter ego” named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. His large-scale paintings showed different scenes across Turtle Island, blending magic realism with dreamy colour pallets depicting many scenes exploring colonialism, gender fluidity, our relationship to land and the aftermath of Canada’s Residential School system. I highly recommend making a trip to Toronto for this exhibit.
My trip to TO was also filled with delish brunches with my sis at The Good Fork (soooo good) and meeting my beautiful new niece, Aviva. La vie est belle.
I also found nourishment in returning to Vancouver, both spiritually and culinarily (of course!). I’d last spent a couple of months living there while performing with Vancouver Opera during a challenging time in my personal life and one way I stayed grounded was by reading Jenny Odell’s book, How to do nothing: resisting the attention economy. Odell is a California-based artist whose installations have been featured in diverse locations including the San Francisco Dump. Her book incorporates philosophy, with chapters on the Ancient Greeks, activism, art, and social commentary. It also introduced me to the iNaturalist app from National Geographic, with which I wandered Vancouver looking up plants and trees, awestruck by the differences in vegetation between here and my home of Toronto. I’ve since grown to appreciate Odell’s teachings even more, after clocking hours of meditation over the pandemic and completing my yoga teacher training this summer. The ability to slow down and pay attention has become one of my greatest values - in relationships, friendships, and music and art-making. Even now, as internet culture continues to create chaos of peoples’ senses of self and morality (see New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino’s opening chapter in the brilliant book, Trick Mirror, or this accompanying Youtube conversation, “The ‘I’ in the Internet” for more on this topic), I think we could all benefit from more time spent doing nothing.
Odell’s book is too rich to choose only one quotation, but I’ll include one for a taste. If you like this sort of reading, I also love Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (I listened to the audiobook while on long pandemic walks), the poetry of W.S. Merwin and Mary Oliver, and Jia Tolentino’s book is full of wisdom if you haven’t read it.
“I remember that not only is my mother an immigrant, but that there is something immigrant about the air I breathe, the water I drink, the carbon in my bones, and the thoughts in my mind. An ecological understanding allows us to identify "things" - rain, cloud, river - at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground below us moves in giant plates. It reminds us that -while it's useful to have a word for that thing called a cloud - when we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that sometimes intersect and hold together long enough to be a ‘cloud.’
Things like the American obsession with individualism, customized filter bubbles, and personal branding - anything that insists on atomized, competing individuals striving in parallel, never touching - does the same violence to human society as a dam does to a watershed.
We should refuse such dams first and foremost within ourselves.”
-Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Ooh, and I nearly forgot… since it’s Kislev, it only seems appropriate to recommend a latke recipe for the breakfasts component of this newsletter. Anthony Rose of Toronto’s famous Fat Pasha/Schmaltz/Fet Zun restaurants shared his latke recipe here (although honestly, the Manischewitz spritz sounds like brunch perfection too…).
That’s it for this month, folx!!! À la prochaine et bon Kislev/décembre :)