Following many routes
From Renaissance theatre around the Mediterranean to parks in Toronto, with stops for overbites and antilibraries.
August 2021
Thank you for signing up to read my newsletter! I hope you enjoy this inaugural issue.
The Sneak Peek
The work of historian Natalie Zemon Davis is what first inspired me to do graduate work about carnival and urban festivals in Renaissance France. She is a giant in the field of history. So it was an enormous privilege to get to be one of the first people to read her most recent book, Leo Africanus Discovers Comedy – written in her 90s! – when I was hired to copyedit it.
And what a marvellous book it is. It uses the story of a Muslim diplomat, Hasan al-Wazzan, who was captured by Christian pirates and spent several years in the court of the Pope in Renaissance Rome, as a jumping-off point to explore and compare the philosophies and practices of theatre in the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian worlds as they intersected around the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It’s a fascinating tale of intercultural exchange, evolution, and sometimes bafflement.
The Tidbit
Not long ago I read Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson, a book not about food, but about all the equipment we’ve used over the course of human history to prepare and eat food. It was full of fascinating bits of information – I kept interrupting my wife’s peaceful reading with new little insights I just had to share.
One of the most intriguing theories in the book is the origin of overbites. For most of history, apparently, humans didn’t have overbites, but Westerners developed them starting in the 18th century when the fork came into common usage. The theory is that, when we tended to use our teeth to tear off pieces of food to eat, our incisors stayed aligned to hold the food in place as we pulled. But once we started cutting it up first, the absence of that regular force left our jaws to shift alignment. And indeed, that shift can be seen in some Chinese skeletons hundreds of years earlier, when eating cut-up food with chopsticks became common! It’s not clear if this theory is fully accepted, but it’s fun to think about.
What’s Up
A converted railway track in Vancouver; an empty space under a Calgary flyover; a series of long-abandoned farms at the western edge of Montreal – all becoming wonderful new urban parks. I’ve been working with the organization Park People to commission a series of articles celebrating transformative park projects across Canada, to mark the organization’s 10th anniversary.
It’s been a pleasure not only to learn about these amazing projects, but also to connect with great writers who are passionate about Canada’s cities. And there’s more to come, with a new story about a once-neglected park in Etobicoke becoming a community hub just published, written by Kelly Boutsalis, a writer I know through Spacing magazine. More are on their way. Check out the charming illustrations accompanying each story, by park aficionado Jake Tobin Garrett.
Quotable
"Instead of a celebration of everything you know, an antilibrary is an ode to everything you want to explore."
Anne-Laure Le Cunff says this about all the unread books on our bookshelves, describing them as an “antilibrary.” As someone with many unread books on my shelves, some of long standing, I appreciate this philosophy! Although I’m less keen on the kind of deliberate way this article goes on to suggest you build an antilibrary. To me, it should be based on serendipity and curiosity.
Pic Pick
It only feels right that the pic pick for the inaugural issue of “Desire Lines” should be ... a desire line. I’ve always loved this term for the informal paths people make that show where they want to go when no path has been provided for them. It’s one of the most basic ways people shape their city from the ground up, as it were. What I also love about them is that it’s not an intentional rebellion or conscious reshaping – it’s just people doing what works for them, their individual actions resulting in a collective act of resistance against designs from above.
This one is in a little park not far from where I live, in an old industrial area transformed by new housing near Carlaw and Dundas in Toronto. I’m a bit disappointed that a new park design would still ignore the obvious route people would want to take, but local feet have redesigned the park nonetheless.