Ways we engage
What the physicality of manuscripts can tell us, some delightful interventions in our public spaces, and the unique version of ourselves carried by each of our friends.
July-August 2022
It looks like this has become a bi-monthly newsletter! A little less frequent, perhaps a little longer, but still, I hope bringing an eclectic, intriguing, yet succinct mix of ideas and information to your inbox.
A theme that emerges from this issue’s stories is engagement. At the broad level, engagement with our city and its politics. At the particular level, how we engage with our community and seek to make it better – both currently, and in the past. And, at the personal level, how we engage with other people, and how that engagement enriches us in a unique way. What we engage with can reveal what we value – the city we live in, the community we are part of, the friends we have. But it can also work the other way – we can learn to value something by engaging with it.
There’s sometimes a sense of guilt around engagement – that we ought to be doing more for our community, stay better connected with our friends. (Write our newsletter more often!). Or there can be burnout – that we can’t keep up with all the engagement we want to do, or do it well enough to feel satisfied. I myself often have both of those feelings, sometimes simultaneously. With the newsletter, I’ve found that the bimonthly rhythm has become the right one – just enough guilt to spur me to do something that results in a feeling of satisfaction and, yes, engagement with people, without feeling overstretched. Now I just need to find that same satisfying rhythm in other things.
The Sneak Peek
Municipal elections can often hinge on prosaic factors – local services, name recognition, fundraising ability. Yet cities face enormous challenges – and significant opportunities. Every four years, when it comes time to vote for who will lead Toronto’s government, Spacing puts out an election issue where we try to get voters and politicians talking about the big picture.
This year, our goal is to bring ambition back to Toronto. It feels like Toronto is content to muddle along, fixing small things as they come up even as huge challenges – climate change, housing, inequality - loom. We ask, what is the Toronto that we want in the future, and how can we get there? Instead of focusing on individual issues, we commissioned five essays on big themes – engagement, sustainability, mobility, building, and well-being – trying to capture the way many different issues come together. I wrote the piece on mobility – a subject I’ve been thinking about for so many years – to explore how we can make Toronto a city where most people don’t need a car.
But it’s not just big picture – we have case studies and statistics, too, and the usual delightful front section stories about interesting projects and issues. One of my favourites is a photo essay by architect Chris Couse of those stick forts that seem to appear in the wilder reaches of Toronto’s parks and ravines, which have always fascinated me. Coming to book and magazine stores, and subscriber’s mailboxes, in September!
The Tidbit
As a historian, I’ve usually looked at manuscripts for what they contain – the text and illustrations. But what can the manuscript itself – its physical form – tell us? It’s a fascinating question Sheila Das asked historian Nick Terpstra on her podcast Flow (around minute 26). Like myself, one of the things Nick studies is confraternities and other associations that came together to perform charitable activities, in his case in the Italian cities of Florence and Bologna. I found his examples fascinating.
One association he studies is of comforters – people who accompanied criminals about to be executed, comforting them and encouraging them to confess, repent, and thus save their souls. The organization kept a book of advice, well-bound with high-quality vellum pages, for the members to consult in learning how to do their difficult, potentially traumatic volunteer work. Vellum softens with wear, Nick explains, and in the first part of the book, which provides the theological grounding and biblical citations for their work, the pages remain stiff. The second part of the book, on the other hand, consists of personal stories of the lived experience of previous comforters in their work – and in that section, the pages are soft and pliable from repeated handling. The vellum tells us what parts the members found truly useful.
Nick’s second example was an orphanage for girls near the poorer part of Florence, founded and funded by women. For the first fifteen or so years, it was run by women, who kept meticulous records in a beautiful, high-quality bound volume. Then, as usually happened, the organization got taken over by men – saying the women meant well, but didn’t have the capacity to run something so complicated (my guess would be they were eyeing the endowment). From that point on, says Nick, the records are chaotic – inconsistent loose-leaf pages gathered together in no order or system. We can see, from the physicality of the records, who cared and who did not.
Compared to when I was a graduate student, studying history now is in many ways easier, with an astonishing range of sources available online. But some things can only be discovered by holding the manuscripts in person.
What’s Up
Toronto is full of fascinating people and wonderful projects, and I’ve always wanted to find ways to feature them more for a wider audience. So I’m really excited to have started writing for the “Together” section of the Toronto Star Sunday edition. I started with a couple of assigned stories (one still to be published), but I also started pitching them on some of my favourite stories – in particular, ones that feed into my longstanding interest in “messy urbanism.”
Here is the first story I pitched them – the story of the Kensington Market Garden Car, which has long been tended by Yvonne Bambrick. Even before the Star accepted the story, I asked Yvonne if I could help/interview her as she took the car out of storage in May. It was such a fun morning – pumping up the tires in the car’s secret storage location, an expedition to get a new tire for one that was on its last legs, watching the car towed into place, and cleaning it as Yvonne started engaging right away with onlookers intrigued by this remarkable creation.
I got the gist of the story into the Star, but there might be more to tell in some other venue in the future. In the meantime, here’s the story!
Yvonne with the tow truck drivers who got the car in place. The car is old and fragile, and also extremely heavy due to all the earth, so this was a particularly challenging job for the tow truck drivers.
Quotable
“I’ve come to understand that it’s a way of holding on not only to my memories of the person who is gone, but also to the version of myself that person saw, and that no one else will ever know.”
Molly McCarron, “If/When”
When Molly was talking to me about the essay she was developing after the untimely death of a long-standing friend, I thought this was such an insight. Every one of our friends – especially those we’ve known a long time – holds a particular version of us. They have a set of memories, common experiences, conversations, and insights that no-one else has. And also, there’s a bunch of things about you that others might know that they don’t – perhaps sometimes for the better. Their version of you is unique, and when you come together, it’s that version of you that they engage with, that they value, that comes to life.
And when a friend dies, the version of you that they know also disappears. You lose not only a friend, but also the version of you that the friend was the holder of. You mourn both of these losses – in Molly’s case, by poring over old messages and texts, like a historian in the archives. Molly writes about this experience of loss evocatively in her moving tribute to her friend and to friendship, “If/When,” published this summer in the Quarantine Review.
Read “If/When” (p. 16 of the PDF)
Pic Pick
In a corner of Ramsden Park, a former brickworks that stretches between the Annex and Rosedale, there’s a Green P parking lot beside an old municipal works building. And in a corner of that parking lot, there’s a patch of random grass. Someone decided that would be a great place to put some chairs so people can hang out. I love that they’re facing each other, as if the chairs themselves are having a fabulous conversation. It feels like any three people who chose to sit in this sort-of-quiet corner would quickly engage with each other.