Joe Fiorito celebrates his hometown, journalism and poetry

In May, Joe Fiorito was the recipient of the 2021 Kouhi Award which recognizes a writer who has contributed significantly to the literature of Northwestern Ontario. 

JOE'S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

 I am delighted to accept this award named to honour Elizabeth Kouhi, and I’m proud to stand with those who have accepted it before me. I want to acknowledge a couple of previous honourees:

Dorothy Colby, whose son Scott was my colleague when I worked at the Toronto Star – we understood some of the same things – small town, big city, two ways of seeing

 Charlie Wilkins – I forget where we met because as soon as I met him, I felt as if I’d known him forever.

And of course my friend Joan Baril, who has done more for northern Ontario writing than anyone I know.

 But let me be specific.

I’m from Fort William.

And in Fort William, I’m from Westfort.

 Westfort is where I learned to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut; as it happens, those are the first tools of a writer.

Westfort is where I learned that nothing is ever what it seems, and that is a tool of journalism; look -  look deep -  and then look deeper.

Westfort is also where I learned not to pick a fight and not to back down from one, and somehow that is the basis for my poetry.

 I learned two quite opposite things on Christina St.: how not to draw attention to myself, and how to tell a story. Both those things valuable in an Italian family; know when to duck, and when to entertain.

 I learned that art could be made from the matter at hand, and this was an accidental lesson: the first time I saw the panels painted in the bush by the group of seven  – hey, look, I used to go fishing there – I realized that the raw material for art is what’s at hand.

The local is universal if you know what to make of it.

 I learned to read early – that is how I learned to write – but a trip down the block to the Mary J. L. Black  Library was not an escape, it was an entry into the world beyond. When I was growing up, I needed to know there was a world beyond; still do, during the Covid times.

 But everywhere I’ve been over the past 40 years I have been guided by the sound of the train rocking past our little stucco house on Christina St. at night, the sulphur smell of the mill on Monday mornings, the sweet smell of the dust from the grain elevators, and the sharp smell of creosote.

Yeah, I still crush a cedar frond between my thumb and forefinger whenever I can, because the fragrance reminds me of home.

Blue lake, blue mountain, blue sky.

 Now, after 35 years of journalism, I have returned to my first love, poetry.  I am self-taught in this way of saying –  but I was led to poetry by three teachers in high school: Jeanie Rigato at St. Pat’s, George Spentzos and above all by Al Jack at Westgate.

I don’t receive this without them.

 Journalism took me away from Northern Ontario. This honour brings me back.

Thank you.

  

The author of eight books, Joe Fiorito won the National Newspaper Award for Columns in 1995; the Brassani Prize for Short Fiction in 2000; and the City of Toronto Book Award in 2003. City Poems, his first book of poetry, was published in 2018, and most recently his poetry collection, All I Have Learned is Where I Have Been (2021), was published by Signal Editions. He lives in Toronto.

Meeting Mortality with Heady Images: Rahat Kurd on Kateri Lanthier

Rahat Kurd introducing Kateri Lanthier at the The Rhizomatic reading series, Thursday, October 15

I’d like to highlight the personally curated nature of The Rhizomatic—that it comes out of a shared passion for attentive reading. The goal of our series is to expand an audience for the poetry that we’ve had time to reflect on, draw meaning from, and form a real attachment to. I read Kateri Lanthier’s Siren last spring, while adjusting to life under quarantine.

Before the official public health emergency was declared, I think a deep survival instinct compelled me to order a coffee grinder, a French press, and several recent poetry titles by women in Canada. Having come through a difficult winter, I had really looked forward to being able to make travel plans in the springtime. Instead I had to accept that in the foreseeable future, my feet would not be leaving the ground. Filling my head with the voices of women poets seemed pretty much medically indicated.

Emergency, necessity, contingency, constraint. Conditions under which women have always made enduring art. Siren, Kateri Lanthier’s second collection of poems, insists on meeting the edge of her own mortality with heady images: cracked amethyst, silver and diamonds; crocuses, peonies and magnolias in full bloom—and comes as close to swooning lyricism as the contemporary register of a made-in Toronto English will allow.

To come to these poems on the page as a solitary reader is to be pulled into a sensibility both cerebral and playful—cerebral, in fact, because playful—making rich use of  allusion, internal rhyme, double entendres, among other forms of word play.

“The Year of La Jetée” was the first poem I read. From the first line—“Three fingers of moon in the glass”—I was struck by the power of mystery. The voice in this poem knows how much to conceal, and how much and when to reveal. The cadence of this mysterious voice pulls the reader in to consider the language more closely (as opposed to deliberate obfuscation, which can repel a reader’s desire to understand). I shared this poem with another friend over the summer, the poet Judith Penner, who wrote, “I love the poem as it reveals itself through re-readings, a slow emerging like the photo, surface light suggesting what’s below.”

Lanthier takes a frank, sensual pleasure in her prerogative as a poet: to structure thought in the marvellous ways that transform the prosaic and the quotidien.

I’m not sure whether it’s the vivid moments of retrospect in her work—remembering a younger self as a “waif in a snowbank”—or her acute consciousness of how closely life is always breathing next to death—that deepens her evocations of eros with a knowingness which is never weary or cynical—in fact, I would call it a lovely wisdom:

“our every kiss a power surge that sparked a rolling blackout”

It’s in both of these moods, particularly in her work with the ghazal form, that Lanthier’s musicality shines in a way that seems to channel the spirit of 19th century Urdu poet, Mirza Ghalib.

I do not say this lightly, or only because Lanthier quotes Ghalib in translation in one of the epigraphs to her collection. In the ten years that I have been reading Ghalib, mostly in Urdu with a very grateful dependence on Urdu-English dictionaries, the help of my mother, and on the learned commentaries that span over 150 years on Frances Pritchett’s encyclopedic Ghalib website at Columbia, I’ve been made constantly aware of the many challenges that translation cannot overcome.

While only a few incorporate a radif or refrain, several poems in Siren embrace two major elements of the ghazal: the stand-alone couplet, and the thematic leap between couplets in a single poem, in a way that expands the lyrical capacities of English. We are living in a rich time of ghazal practitioners in English—Natasha Trethewey and Amit Majmudar come to mind, while my personal Ustad is the late Agha Shahid Ali. But even dispensing with the classical qafia/radif (rhyme/refrain) pattern, I suspect that it’s Lanthier who’s been struck by Ghalib’s particular lightning.

I’m going to ask Kateri to tell us, later on, about her experience of reading Ghalib in translation, which she wrote about in a wonderful and moving personal essay, “Lifelines: Of Heart, Lungs, Blood, and Ghazals." You can read it in the anthology Against Death: 35 Essays On Living, published by Anvil Press in 2019, edited by Vancouver’s own Elee Kraljii Gardiner. 

Kateri, welcome to The Rhizomatic.

Sunday Poem

 

SCHISM

For David Rothberg

Ice by chance, by fate or divine grace,
Ice as a prayer answered or seasonal necessity… We approve.
But ice by any means possible? Ice, a commodity
manufactured, apportioned, rented, sold by the hour?

No: the end, no matter how smooth and immutable,
cannot justify the means: ammonia, compressors, chain-link fences,
the whole rotten professional petrochemical sports industry…
They just want to make us skate—and drive—round in circles.

Hear, hear. But the kids do need to run some drills:
We have no power play and a pathetic penalty kill.
Can we not just have a practice, like other teams?
There’s the rub: we buy into it and the kids will as well.

A-ha the purist shows his true colours!
Next you’ll want to ban rubber pucks and plastic helmets.
How about refusing to consume? I’m coach. I decide.
Tomorrow it is. To Dave, my fellow Ottawan, this aside:

Seen the pond? I caught a glimpse as I drove by.
Minus twenty tonight. Imagine it all sheer and black.
Let’s skip practise, grab our skates, rope and sticks,
And ride our bikes down there first thing to tiptoe out

and test our convictions. Tap-tap. Give us a faith
sufficient to withstand, though free to crack,
a surface that inspires awe and dread.
What love does not tremble at the touch and quake?
How can it be ice if it doesn’t break?

 

By Richard Sanger, from Fathers at Hockey (Signal Editions Chapbook, 2020) 

Get Them By Heart

Matthew Schneier mulls the importance of reciting poetry:

I have always found the place for the genuine in poetry to be unlocked not by just reading it but by memorizing it. And it’s a good exercise, in the midst of chaos, to give yourself over to a sound and a rhythm that is not your own. It takes time—you probably have plenty—and effort. But you feel poems differently when you get them by heart and say them out loud. You have to chew them, and their rhythms overpower yours. It frees you up, to submit to them: It’s self-abnegation by incantation, your very own ventriloquist’s act.

Speaking The Old Dialect

In an online interview for the Librissimi Toronto Italian Book Festival, Nino Ricci touches on how immigration can shape identity.

Part of what I was exploring in Lives of the Saints were the kinds of stories we tell ourselves, how we structure our own imagination as a way of making sense of our lives. People talked about America from the perspective of the old country and, even though they often had access to accurate information—they had relatives who had gone over and were writing back and were telling them what things were like—there was always that kind of mythical side to it of a promised land they were hoping to reach. One of the things that I found in my research and in interviewing immigrants is that often that dynamic ended up getting reversed through immigration. Once they had established themselves, say, in Canada, and been relatively prosperous, they then began to romanticize the land they left behind. It became a sort of lost paradise, the lost place of wholeness: “Yes, we were poor, but we had enough to eat, we were well.” I found it very poignant, that very strong sense I got from speaking with immigrants of that lost wholeness that can never be recaptured. And even when they travelled back, they couldn’t recapture it because they had become Canadianized. Their Italian was now mixed with English words that they weren’t even aware of. People saw them as old-fashioned because they were speaking the old dialect, or they saw them as no longer real residents. There’s a very poignant element to the immigrant experience in that regard that you never really wholly integrate into the new country, but you can never really go back to the old one, and that was part of what I was exploring in that first trilogy. By the time I get to Sleep, when I think of identity I think of this very complex thing, that is something we put together haphazardly with whatever materials are given to us over time. For example, I was raised in a small Southern Ontario town where the Catholicism in my head was not the Catholicism in Italy. It was post-Vatican II and it was much more streamlined and demystified. The Latin was gone, we didn’t talk about the Saints, there was no emphasis on the miracles, I lived close to the border, the TV I watched was American, the music I listened to was American. I had all these American influences which informed me, this panoply of different cultural influences that made me what I am. So, my Italianness took shape within the framework of all these other things. So, we need to think of identity in those terms, not as singular, not as defining or even as determined, but something that is shaped from what is available, from the sources that are available. I made a conscious decision to travel to Italy and re-own my culture that my parents never had access to. I spent years studying in Florence. What did my parents know of Florentine culture growing up in the villages that they grew up in? But I had access to it through them. So that’s how I think of identity now, as something that is multi-faceted, something that to a certain extent we can choose and enhance.

Open Letters Are A Graveyard of Prose

Graeme Wood enumerates the sins of the open letter. My favourite? They are badly written.

Open letters tend to be composed inclusively, so as many people as possible will sign them. They can bear no traces of their individual authors, and the easiest way to scrub those traces is to write in a numbing, anonymized style, free of idiosyncrasy and wit. (If you seek idiosyncrasy and wit, read the articles that my Atlantic colleagues who signed the letter write under their own names.) This process deadens the language, and the result in the case of the Harper’s letter is a graveyard of prose, without a single pungent phrase or sentence worthy of quotation. Humor is especially forbidden. Martin Amis signed the letter, but I have read enough Amis to know he would never have written that letter if he thought that on some literary Judgment Day he would be called before God to answer alone for its style.

The Hyper-Ambitious Miniaturist

In a review of Lydia Davis' Essays, James Ley places the U.S. writer's rise inside a period when "hyper-ambitious male novelists" were trapped "in a creative arms race to see who could write the mightiest, brainiest, zeitgeistiest tome." Davis, he argues, went hard in the opposite direction.

She excels as a miniaturist. Though she has published one novel, The End of the Story (1995), she betrays not the slightest interest in making any kind of grand statement. Her stories rarely extend beyond a few pages. Many consist of a single paragraph. Some are no more than a line or two. There is no striving for cultural definitiveness, no panoramic vision or flaunting of intellectual pretensions. Davis’ fiction is narrow in focus and precise in execution, written with an eye for the unusual angle. She is a major writer who produces almost exclusively ‘minor’ work.

Talking to a Portrait—An Excerpt

French world champion cyclist Alfred Letourneur pulling an Airstream Liner trailer on a runway at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport, 1947

For over thirty years, Rosalind Pepall helped plan and organize dozens of major exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In Talking to a Portrait—released this week—Pepall distills that experience into fifteen essays that explore the unexpected turns and obsessions of her job as curator. 

She writes about artists falling in and out of love, family tragedies, the creation of the Stanley Cup, the secrets of Tiffany, Antiques Roadshow, watercolour sketchbooks of the Canadian north, a beautiful prayer room in Montreal, gondolas flying through windows in Venice. 

In the following essay taken from the book—titled "It Rides along the Highway like a Stream of Air, but Will It Fit into the Museum?"—we see how curating isn't always the intellectual, sedate activity we might imagine it to be. Sometimes it’s closer to madcap, adrenaline-filled troubleshooting.

____

In 1930s America, radical changes in industrial design produced calculators that looked like diesel engines,Top-O-Stove potato bakers that resembled zeppelins, and Zephyr irons that looked like rocket ships ready for takeoff from the ironing board. With their sweeping lines, rounded corners and gleaming metal, these items evoked fast cars, speeding trains and soaring airplanes. Consumers mired in the Depression embraced this streamlined aesthetic wholeheartedly as a sign of an exciting and hopeful future. Blenders, toasters, weighing scales, hair dryers, electric saws—all manner of household appliances were redesigned to suit the new modernist look. Two hundred such items were presented in the travelling exhibition American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow.When the show came to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2007, I was the Canadian curator in charge of its installation.

There is nothing particularly glamorous about a Thor Silver Line electric saw, a Silvertone Rocket radio, or a Presto Streamlined stapler except their names. In the new millennium, the objects themselves seemed quaint. The exhibition needed a jolt: something big, shiny and eye-catching.

How about an airplane? I thought.

I put in a call to the Canadian Aviation Museum—housed in a huge airfield hangar on the outskirts of Ottawa—and arranged a visit. Among the bombers and a bush plane with a canoe attached to its side, I spied a shiny aluminum Lockheed 10a Electra. Lockheed had manufactured the twin-engine plane from 1934 to 1941, and this particular one had seen many years of use by Trans-Canada Airlines, the precursor to Air Canada. The company’s logo, a red-and-green maple leaf with “TCA” in gold letters in the middle, was painted on the plane’s nose. Also, Amelia Earhart had flown a variation of the Electra Model 10 in 1937 on her legendary fatal flight around the world.

Perfect, I thought. A vintage 1930s airplane with a compelling story and a Canadian connection.

But would the Aviation Museum lend it to the show, and would the Electra fit inside the museum? The wing tips could be removed and the Ottawa museum was planning to relocate the plane anyway, according to its curator. Armed with the Electra’s exact measurements, I returned to Montreal delighted with my discovery.

Back at the museum, the news from head of installations Paul Tellier was discouraging. Yes, we could remove two panels of a glass exterior wall, dismantle the Electra’s wingtips, and fit her length into the museum. But the two huge spherical engines on either side of the airplane’s body could not be removed and together were just three feet too wide for the exterior wall. “Pas possible!” said Tellier, shaking his head.

Disappointed but undaunted, I searched for some other object or vehicle that could make a bold visual impression. Flipping through the exhibit’s catalogue, I came upon a black-and-white photograph of a cyclist, vigorously pedalling—pulling an Airstream trailer behind him. The motorhome glistened in the sun, all smooth sculptural curves and bright aluminum, and typified modern aerodynamic design. Light enough to be pulled by a bicycle as a publicity stunt, its hand-riveted panels were derived from airplane construction. The trailer rode along the highway “like a stream of air” according to the founder of Airstream Trailers, Wallace Byam, when he introduced his first aluminum Clipper model in 1936. The luxury home on wheels was produced in great numbers in the post-war 1940s. Fully equipped for dining and sleeping in a compact functional space, it presented modern travel as fun, adventurous, comfortable and cheap. Designed to be resistant to changes in temperature, the post-war series of Airstream Liners were built with outer and inner aluminum shells (Aero-core fibreglass insulation sandwiched between) over a pipe-frame chassis. No screws or nails were used on the body (they loosened with road wear). The Airstream trailer epitomized supreme craftsmanship in industrial design. It was a work of art fit for a museum.

But how to lay my hands on a vintage model in pristine condition? Through the North American Vintage Airstream Club, I found myself talking to Fred Coldwell, its Denver-based historian and the proud owner of a 1948Wee Wind, one of the smallest models that Airstream produced. The sixteen-foot trailer had all the typical French world champion cyclist Alfred Letourneur pulling an Airstream Liner trailer on a runway at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport, Airstream features: Air-O-Lite windows, curved entrance door, castbronze nameplates. There were no toilet or bathing facilities in this early model but it had a single bed, two chairs, a fold-up Formicatopped table for dining, and a rear double bed/sofa with the original Gruda, California, upholstery. The aluminum and stainless-steel kitchen galley included sink, storage compartments, a three-burner stove and icebox,and even a tiny built-in receptacle for used matches. A wooden closet, a chest of drawers and a butane heater with castiron front grille completed the trailer. Fred had lovingly preserved his Airstream, which he called Ruby after its original owner, and he offered to drive her from Colorado to Montreal for the show.

Perfect, I thought. But as the months passed, Fred had second thoughts about taking Ruby on the road. Less than two weeks before the show was set to begin, he emailed to say that he was not up to making the four-day trip to Montreal and back. I couldn’t blame him—but he had left me in the lurch.

I put in a frantic call to Airstream’s vintage-model shop in Jackson Center, Ohio.

“Would you have a trailer from the 1940s that you could lend to an exhibition in Montreal?” I asked.

“Hm, when is your show?” said the communications director, Rick March.

“In two weeks!” I replied.

“I think we might have one, let me check,” replied Rick.

Several long minutes later, he returned.

“Okay, ah… we’ve got a 1948 Airstream Liner, twenty-four feet

long—”

“I’ll take it!” I said quickly.

“—but the interior’s gutted,” he continued, “and I can’t in good conscience let you exhibit an unfurnished shell.”

“We’ll lock the door,” I said.

“Well, okay, but there are windows—I don’t want anyone to see the inside.”

“We’ll make curtains and cover the windows,” I said.

“Curtains? Hmm… I don’t know…”

After much coaxing, Rick agreed. Airstream Inc. saved the show. With no time to shop for vintage 1940s printed textiles, museum conservator Estelle Richard began sewing off-white linen curtains to hang inside every window.

Six days before the vernissage, the 1948 Airstream Liner arrived in Montreal from Ohio. With all hands on deck, the trailer was unloaded from the transport truck to street level. Part of the museum’s side-entrance glass wall had been removed in advance and our carpenters had built a wooden ramp to wheel the trailer inside. But as the museum’s technicians pushed it up the ramp, they stopped and groaned. It was too high for the opening! The culprit was a small chimney sticking out from the top of the roof. The height measurements we received had not included this unassuming appendage. But when I looked back at photographs of the trailer, its top air-vents closing flush with the roofline, there was the chimney, but hardly visible.

The Airstream representative and the museum’s technicians stood around scratching their heads. Measurements down to the last millimetre were checked. The removal of the chimney was debated. The clock was ticking. Finally, some clever fellow suggested deflating the tires. More measurements were taken and the tires were slightly deflated. Inch by inch, the aluminum shell was guided through the open wall and rolled into the museum galleries.

“Ça y est!” exclaimed the technicians. “That’s it!”

On the street, a crowd of passers-by clapped and cheered. When the exhibition opened, the trailer looked spectacular. It filled the space like an outsized modernist sculpture and formed an arresting backdrop to the power tools, electric fans and outboard motors.

Little did visitors know how bumpy the ride had been—anything but a smooth stream of air.

An Introduction to Salt Cod

By Richard Sanger

The fashion for beaver hats in 17th century London and Paris was what first led our settler ancestors to explore Canada and establish trading posts on our lakes and rivers. Or so we’re taught in school. But long before that, before even John Cabot and Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence, there was something else that brought Europeans to our shores: cod. In the early accounts, the fish are so plentiful that they can be pulled out of the sea with baskets and boats can hardly cut through the thick shoals. It’s no surprise that the great historian Harold Innes followed up his classic study of the fur trade with a book on the cod fishery. As late as even 1990, my Scottish nephew, then a fish merchant with a gift for hyperbole (and now TV presenter), was assuring me that if they didn’t catch the cod, we’d be able to walk across the Atlantic on their backs. We all know where that idea led.

Once the fish was caught, however, it had to be preserved. The way to do this was by drying it in the air and packing it in salt. And to dry it properly, you had to come ashore. In fact, if Mark Kurlansky is to be believed (and he’s only written three books on the topic: A Basque History of the World, Salt and Cod), Basque fisherman were coming ashore in Newfoundland to do exactly this long before Columbus sailed—they just kept their fishing grounds a secret. Starting in the 1500s, the bounty they and others caught would become a staple throughout Europe and the Americas, and a key part of various trade routes. One route took salt cod to Catholic southern Europe, where it became a special Christmas dish in Spain and Portugal, wine and olive oil north to Britain, and then British dry goods and hardware out to Newfoundland. Another route took the fish to the West Indies, as cheap source of protein for the plantations, later becoming the national dish of Jamaica, and sent sugar and rum back to Maritimes. By the 1950s, the cod fishery had expanded into the industrial-scale overfishing that culminated in the 1992 Cod moratorium which threw 30,000 Newfoundlanders out of work. There now exists a small inshore cod fishery that supplies some of the Canadian market; the rest is imported from Norway and elsewhere.

Nowadays, the bigger secret seems to be how to cook it. Outside of certain communities (Newfoundland, Portuguese, West Indians, Scandinavians), few Canadians know what to do with salt cod. I discovered it when I lived in Spain in the 1980’s. At first, those grayish salt-encrusted fish fillets in wooden boxes seemed much less inviting than the Spanish hams that hung from the rafters of stores or the Manchego cheese on the counter. Then under the tutelage of my Spanish friends, I learnt how to soak and cook bacalao—and saw how those stiff salty planks could be transmuted by a judicious overnight soaking. The revived salt cod wasn’t the same as fresh fish—it seemed to become a miraculous new substance whose translucent strands that made me think of fibre optic cables or edible fibreglass. You could eat it raw, as the Catalans do in esqueixada, and it didn’t smell the way fresh fish does. Or you could cook it in a myriad other ways—the most impressive of all being the Basque dish bacalao al pil-pil, which my friend Salvador would take me out to taste at a special restaurant in Seville. I have cooked salt cod ever since, often at large family gatherings.

Bacalao al pil-pil is difficult to cook—it involves cooking a whole fillet of soaked salt cod with the skin still attached over a low heat in an earthenware dish and jiggling it constantly while adding a steady stream of olive oil. The jiggling at a low heat causes the oil to mix with the fishy liquid and skin and create an emulsion, a kind of warm mayonnaise. Since I tend to buy the deboned salt cod (which is also deskinned), it’s not something I often try—though I order it whenever I can.

The last time I visited Spain, we made a trip through the Basque country and just as we got to Santander, I realized I still hadn’t had my pil-pil. At a restaurant near the old port, la Pirula, there was a dish called bacalao three ways (one of which was pil-pil) and, when I demurred, the wonderfully ironic and conspiratorial waiter poured me an unusual Galician red wine and told me “I believe we will be able to rise to the standard you demand." We went outside. When the dish came, two of the cod tapas were delicious but the pil-pil was salty. We ate most of it anyway and just drank more wine. As we were paying, the waiter came out to ask how it was. When I said actually it was a bit too salty, he tasted it the little bit left and said “Oh no, no, no. I can’t possibly charge you for that. I’m so sorry. And you know what? Tomorrow I’m going get hold of the boy who sold me that fish and execute him in the public square. Normally I do it at 8 in the morning but since you’re a tourist, I‘ll do it at 11 so you can come and watch." Like the other culinary cult I belong to—the Seville orange marmalade makers—salt cod has a way of making strangers bond.

Here are four of my favourite recipes. There are, of course, many others: the Portuguese have a recipe for every day of the year, the Brazilians cook it with coconut milk, and the Jamaicans prepare it with ackee and callaloo.

Buying and soaking the salt cod

Portuguese and Italian fish stores and groceries usually stock it, as do the larger supermarkets. For the deboned, skinless fillets I buy, the whiter and softer the fillet, the better. To soak, cut your fillet into pieces 3 or 4 inches long, rinse well and soak overnight, changing the water 3 or 4 times before you start to cook. (Use plenty of water, say, two litres per pound of salt cod). Once soaked, test the saltiness in the thickest part of the fish— you still want some as the flavour will dissipate with cooking, i.e. it should be mildly salty, edible not overwhelming. (If you ever oversoak the fish, it is possible to resalinate the fish.)

Esqueixada

Esqueixada (which means “torn apart”) is a kind of Catalan ceviche—the markets in Catalonia sell torn up bits of salt cod especially for this dish. This recipe is adapted from Sam and Sam Clark’s Casa Moro cookbook, the second book of recipes from their great London restaurant.

Ingredients

450g salt cod soaked 24 hours and water changed 3 times.
2 green peppers, thinly sliced
1 red pepper, thinly sliced
20 or so cherry tomatoes sliced in half
big handful of Italian parsley, chopped up.
1 small red onion, thinly sliced
12-20 oil-cured black olives, pitted and halved

Vinaigrette dressing:
1-2 garlic cloves, crushed into
2 tablespoons red wine and sherry vinegar
5-6 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and black pepper.
Some chili pepper flakes (optional)

Method

Shred the salt cod with your fingers into little tufts and put in a missing bowl. Add the sliced pepper, tomatoes, onion and parsley. Marinade in the vinaigrette for at least an hour before serving.

Brandade

There are lots of recipes for brandade, the Provençal salt cod spread. This is the simplest and the best I have found. It’s wonderful on crackers or as a filling for baked potatoes. The Venetian version is called baccalà mantecato. This recipe is adapted from the Newfoundlander Edward O. Jones’ Salt Cod Cuisine, a loving compendium of salt cod lore and recipes from all over the world.

Ingredients

450g salt cod, soaked
Half a cup (125ml) olive oil
Half a cup (125ml) heavy cream (35%)
2-3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 teaspoon lemon juice
Ground nutmeg
6 oil-cured black olives (for decoration)

Method

Poach the soaked cod: place it in a pot of cold water, bring to a low boil and turn off immediately Let stand for not more than 10 minutes, then remove fish and break up in to small pieces in bowl or blender. Add crushed garlic. Warm oil in one pot and cream in another and add alternately in a steady stream, blending or stirring until you reach a smooth creamy consistency. Season with nutmeg, lemon juice and pepper.

Bacalao a la Graciosa
This is the first salt cod dish I cooked and for many years was the only one. The recipe came originally from the second cookbook I ever owned, Anna Macmiadhachain’s Spanish Regional Cookery, long out of print but beautifully illustrated with line drawings by the author’s husband. My copy of the book disappeared many years ago (along with the girlfriend who gave it to me) but I continued to cook the dish from memory. When I ordered another copy on the internet, I realized that peppercorns were my own addition. The secret of the dish is that there is no water—all the liquid in the broth comes from the vegetables and it's delicious. Graciosa is one of the Canary Islands which Anna and her artist husband visited in the 1970s.

Ingredients

450g salt cod soaked overnight, and then shredded into large strips
2-3 large onions, sliced sideways in rounds
4-6 tomatoes, cored and sliced in rounds
3-4 green peppers, sliced sideways in rounds
4-6 large (russet) potatoes, sliced sideways in thin rounds
20-40 black peppercorns
2-3 bay leaves
Olive oil

Method

In a large heavy-bottomed pot, pour a bit of olive oil and then layer the ingredients by order of wetness: half the tomatoes, half the onions, half the green peppers, half the soaked cod, half the potatoes; then repeat these layers with the remaining ingredients, scattering the peppercorns and bay leaves in amongst the cod strips. Cook covered for 1-2 hours, starting at medium-low heat and being very careful not to burn the bottom layer. Once the vegetables have given off enough liquid that it bubbles up round the sides and starts to cook the top layer of potatoes (which you may want to push down with a plate), turn the heat down to simmer. When the top layer of potatoes is cooked, the dish is ready.

Gratin de morue
This is the dish I make for special occasions. It’s easy to prepare in advance, and an impressive creation to pull out of your oven and land on the table. It is also a fish dish whose key ingredients do not require refrigeration, can be easily transported and stored almost indefinitely. I once threw a party for a group of visiting francophone playwrights and actors who had spent a week in Toronto living on fast food and this was the dish I cooked (Canadian raw materials, French savoir-faire)—even the actress from the fishing port of St. Pierre praised it. Cookbook author Patricia Wells, whose recipe I’ve adapted, calls it one of her favourite fish dishes in the world. These quantities will make one big lasagna dish (25x35cm or 10x14”) and should feed 8 or more people.

Ingredients

700-1000g salt cod soaked overnight
3 cups milk
5-6 sprigs fresh thyme (3 teaspoons chopped)
3-4 bay leaves
2-3kg baking potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced (easiest with a mandoline)
2 egg yolks
200cl sour cream
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
3-4 tablespoons butter
1 garlic clove halved

Method

Poach the soaked cod: place it in a pot of cold water at medium heat, bring to a low boil and turn off immediately. Let stand for not more than 10 minutes, drain and then tear up into small pieces. In a large pot, pour the milk, bay leaves and thyme and then add all the sliced potatoes and simmer at medium heat until the potatoes are cooked through. Whisk the egg yolks into the sour cream in a small bowl and then stir this into the potato mixture. Rub the lasagna dish first with the cut sides of the raw garlic and then with 1 tablespoon of butter. Spoon half the potato mixture into the dish, add the poached cod bits and then cover it with the rest of the potato mixture. Dot the remaining two tablespoons of butter and bake at 350F (175C) for 45 minutes until the top is golden.

Richard Sanger's poetry collections include Shadow Cabinet and Calling Home. He lives in Toronto.

Usurped, Erased, and Taken over

Hafez is one of Persia's most influential poets. Too bad many of the quotes and poems attributed to him in English are bogus. Omar Safi, director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center, tells the story about the booming market in counterfeit Muslim poetry:

This is the time of the year where every day I get a handful of requests to track down the original, authentic versions of some famed Muslim poet, usually Hafez or Rumi. The requests start off the same way: "I am getting married next month, and my fiance and I wanted to celebrate our Muslim background, and we have always loved this poem by Hafez. Could you send us the original?" Or, "My daughter is graduating this month, and I know she loves this quote from Hafez. Can you send me the original so I can recite it to her at the ceremony we are holding for her?"

It is heartbreaking to have to write back time after time and say the words that bring disappointment: The poems that they have come to love so much and that are ubiquitous on the internet are forgeries. Fake. Made up. No relationship to the original poetry of the beloved and popular Hafez of Shiraz.

For Safi, it's one more example of Western appropriation:

Part of what is going on here is what we also see, to a lesser extent, with Rumi: the voice and genius of the Persian speaking, Muslim, mystical, sensual sage of Shiraz are usurped and erased, and taken over by a white American with no connection to Hafez's Islam or Persian tradition. This is erasure and spiritual colonialism. Which is a shame, because Hafez's poetry deserves to be read worldwide alongside Shakespeare and Toni Morrison, Tagore and Whitman, Pablo Neruda and the real Rumi, Tao Te Ching and the Gita, Mahmoud Darwish, and the like.

Arrows That Strike At The Heart Of Readers

Aphorisms, argues Andrew Hui, not only predate Western philosophy, but "constitute the first efforts at speculative thinking." Thinking aphoristically, he says, remains a foundational part of any intellectual tradition. One member of the "cult of the fragment"? Nietzsche:

His philology on fragments became a philosophy of fragments when he abandoned his profession as a classicist in the late 1870s. Rather than just studying aphorisms, he started producing them. In the most fertile stretch of his life, from Human, All Too Human (1878) to Ecce Homo (1888), he composed thousands upon thousands of pithy sayings and maxims. The fragmentary form became the preferred style for the rest of his life. The prophet in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) speaks in enigmatic dithyrambs reminiscent of the wisdom literature of antiquity.

Nietzsche’s aphoristic form becomes his way of training his readers not to subscribe to a doctrine or a particular Nietzschean view of life, but rather to create and craft their own philosophy of life. He writes that "in books of aphorisms like mine there are plenty of forbidden, long things and chains of thoughts between and behind short aphorisms." What this means is that Nietzsche will not spoon-feed his readers. His method is like Heraclitus’—intense, difficult, aporetic maxims and arrows that strike at the heart of readers, seizing or destabilising their habits of thought. They are required to do much work, to investigate what is "between and behind" his sharp words.

Black Lives Matter in Montreal

While putting together a Black Lives Matter syllabus to celebrate the contribution of Black writers in Montreal, Robyn Maynard looks closely at the city's failure to confront it's own history:

Montreal is often absent from national discussions about race and anti-Blackness, which tend to centre on Toronto and Halifax. This city, home to Black persons for over four hundred years, demonstrates little official recognition of the significant historical and literary contributions of Black writers and scholars. Despite organizing efforts by Black students, including a present-day push at Concordia University, there is no Black Studies program in Montreal, and less than one percent of full-time faculty at the two English universities are Black. Even the basics of Black Montreal history—such as slavery—are still absent or minimized in most school curriculums.

As in other Canadian cities, Black communities in Montreal have been subject to centuries of structural violence, including two centuries of enslavement, ongoing targeting by police, over-incarceration, and over-representation in child apprehensions by welfare agencies. These realities are inextricable from Black visions of past, present, and future Montreal, and continue to inform both non-fiction and creative writing.

The Unluckiest Businessman in the World

Here's a short chapter from Éric Plamondon’s Apple S, translated from the French by Dimitri Nasrallah. Originally appearing in 2013, the novel completes Véhicule Press' publication of the 1984 Trilogy into English. Gabriel Rivages, Plamondon's alter ego, is the the central unifying figure across the trilogy. He performs all the online searches and collects the constellation of facts about Johnny Weissmuller, Richard Brautigan, Steve Jobs—and, this case, Ron Wayne, the little-known Apple co-founder.

Originally, it’s spelled: iota, khi, theta, upsilon, sigma. In Ancient Greek, ichtus means fish. In Roman, it corresponds to the first letters of the following five words: Iêsos Christos Theou Uios Sôtèr (ictus). It means: Jesus Christ, son of God, Savior. That’s how the fish became the symbol of Christ. For Rivages, this all reminds him of his grandmother. She always had the same bumper sticker on her car. It was a sticker in the shape of a fish with Jesus written across it. His grandmother attended mass every Sunday. She never knew that the fish related back to the Greeks. What does that change anyways? Nothing, but Rivages can’t help but uncover origin stories when he wants to understand.

Not much is known about the origins of the April Fool’s tradition. Why do we tell tall tales on that day? Why do we play tricks? Why do we tape paper fish on people’s backs It could connect back to the Zodiac. This would have come about at the time that the Sun rose from the sign of Pisces. There’s also a story that speaks of the end of Lent. Others say that to celebrate the Annunciation people gave presents on the first day of April. They commemorated the day that the Archangel Gabriel tells Mary she’s pregnant.

Apple is officially founded on April 1, 1976. April Fool’s Day. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak own ninety percent of the business. The remaining ten percent belongs to Ron Wayne. He’s the one who draws the company’s first logo with Newton sitting under an apple tree. But two weeks later, Ron changes his mind. He regrets jumping into this adventure. He doesn’t believe in it. Anyways, he doesn’t like the idea of founding a company on April Fool’s Day.

He sees it as a bad omen. He sells his shares back to the two Steves for eight hundred dollars. Thirty years later, they’re valued at three billion. Ever since April 1, 1976, Ron Wayne has the impression that a permanent paper fish has been pasted to his back.

John Barth Was Astonishingly Boring

John Domini does his best to reverse the reputational damage that John Barth, once a towering figure in postmodern American writing, has suffered:

For the better part of 40 years, applause for this author has gone largely unheard. In the Times Book Review, for instance, the novel [Angela] Carter so admired took a loud thwacking. Gore Vidal, both in print and on TV, insisted that Barth was “astonishingly boring.” Long and short, the man couldn’t catch a break. His work suffered worse than that of any writer who followed his lead. Unlike, say, Donald Barthelme, Barth became one of those “no one reads anymore.” First Raymond Carver made him look prissy, then David Foster Wallace rendered him unhip.

Now, the buffeting of cultural winds is always a risk. Arthur Miller, one of our greatest playwrights, saw all his later plays trashed—a damning indictment, according to Tony Kushner, of the critical establishment. To me the case of later Barth looks awfully similar.