What’s Making Me Happy

Scrolling back through my posts since 2021 began, I’m struck by the general bleakness of a lot of what I’ve been writing about … which not unsurprising, given that much of it has had to do with American politics, and I’ve been writing as we approach the one-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic, with the prospect of it persisting as late as the autumn.

I’m not one for such practices as daily affirmations, but sometimes it’s helpful to remind oneself about what is making you happy. One of my favourite podcasts is NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour; once a week they have a segment titled “what’s making us happy this week,” in which the hosts share, well, what’s making them happy that week—what books or film or TV or other things that give them delight.

Well, I’m stealing the idea. I’ve already done so on occasion when I teach—I will ask my students every so often what’s making them happy—though I’m usually treated to silence punctuated now and then with an enthusiastic endorsement of something. But I’m now bringing it to my blog. Don’t expect it to be weekly, though.

So what’s making me happy right now?

Stephanie on the Guitar and Sir Terry Pratchett     Since posting my QAnon piece this morning, I’ve been working away on an article that I’ve had stewing on my brain’s back burner for a long time: I’m titling it “The Pragmatic Pratchett,” and it argues that the political and moral philosophy that Sir Terry developed over his forty-one Discworld novels (and his other fiction and non-fiction) is a form of “magical humanism” that squares up quite nicely with the American school of Pragmatism á là John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and Judith Shklar. We’re currently on midterm break here, so I’m trying to pound out one thousand words and day and have something approaching a rough draft by the time classes resume in a week. I hit 1400 words today, and will continue work on it after dinner.

Meanwhile, as I write in my office, Stephanie is in the next room doing something musical. One of her hobbies is to record songs and post videos of herself playing to YouTube. Lately, she’s been getting into the project of making backing tracks for people to play guitar over. But today she’s broken out the guitar again, and so as I write about Sir Terry, I can hear her playing. It’s quite lovely—it’s almost like being serenaded.

I love watching her get absorbed in whatever project she’s working on. It is a form of self-care, a mental respite from her job as a full-time nurse. She is a perfectionist when it comes to her musical projects, and will spend hours plugged into her laptop and various musical doodads (I am, it should go without saying, musically illiterate). I like to joke that she’s obsessive and I’m compulsive, and that together we make up a complete neurosis.

The Mandalorian     I finally caved and subscribed to Disney Plus. Stephanie and I binged the two extant seasons of The Mandalorian over the course of a week, watching the season two finale last Wednesday. Since then I have been rewatching some of my favourite scenes on my laptop, as well as watching the various fan reaction videos.

Jon Favreau just gets it—he gets the texture of the Star Wars universe, he gets the aspects of it that make for good stories (and eschews those that don’t), and somehow he made a legion of viewers fall in love with a goddamn muppet.

I loved the Ewoks when I first watched Return of the Jedi—but then again, when I first watched Jedi, I was eleven years old. The cloying cute little teddy bears of Endor have not aged well, so when I first heard the name “Baby Yoda” and saw the images, I was skeptical—another merchandising opportunity, I thought, at the expense of good storytelling. Well, I don’t mind admitting how wrong I was—Baby Yoda, aka Grogu, was impossibly cute, but somehow not cloyingly so. And the relationship between “the kid” and Din Djarin was quite beautifully done—a testament to Pedro Pascal’s acting chops, considering that we see his face all of three times over sixteen episodes.

(Fun fact: if you binge The Mandalorian not long after binging Schitt’s Creek, as Stephanie and I did, it is nearly impossible not to shout—in one’s best Moira Rose voice—“the Bébé!” every time Baby Yoda shows his face).

And the casting. Jeebus, the casting. I got the sense as I watched that Jon Favreau would just call up friends and say “Hey, I’m doing this Star Wars thing, you want in?” Such a great ensemble of actors. There is something exquisite about hearing Werner Herzog say, “I hear you are ze best in ze parzec.” There is something equally exquisite in seeing Giancarlo Esposito bring all of his equable Gus Fring menace to the role of Moff Gideon. Ming-Na Wen as a deadly assassin? Yes please. Timothy Olyphant playing a variation on Seth Bullock and Raylen Givens as the marshal of a mining town on Tatooine? Gods, yes. Bill Burr as an irascible mercenary thief? Natalia Tena, aka Nymphadora Tonks, as a hissing, blade throwing alien? Richard Ayoade as the voice of a priggish but deadly droid? Taika Waititi, who also directed a few episodes, as a droid programmed to care for Baby Yoda? Jason Sudeikas and Adam Palley bantering as a pair of inept stormtroopers? Also: considering that we interrupted our viewing of Battlestar Galactica (Stephanie had never seen it, so I felt it my moral obligation to introduce her to it) to watch The Mandalorian, Katee Sackhoff’s appearance as fellow Mandalorian Bo Katan felt particularly apropos.

But one of my favourite cameos also relates to the way Jon Favreau is building out the post-Return of the Jedi universe, in which the New Republic must now actually govern. It’s a new normal in which the X-wing pilots are no longer the heroic flyboys and -girls of the movies, but are essentially cops on a beat, who give Mando grief for his ship’s broken transponder in the same way an exasperated traffic cop might give you a pass on a broken taillight. In a later episode of season two, a dumpy, balding X-wing pilot suggests to Cara Dune that she should take on the role of Marshal in her town, now that the former Empire was more or less expunged. “Wait,” I said as we watched, “isn’t that the father from Kim’s Convenience?” And indeed it was—Korean-Canadian actor Paul Sun-Hyung Lee (who according to his iMDB page, “Is a member of the Star Wars costuming group The 501st Legion”).

It was the clipboard in the pilot’s hand that made it art.

Pie-Making     … or, as I like to pronounce it, “PAH!” Given that I’m not a desserts person, the vast majority of my pies are savoury. I’ve made it something of a custom, when I make a roast chicken, to make stock from the carcass the next day and use the meat coming off to the bone to make stew, which then goes to making chicken pot pie. I have also done the same with leftover roast beef.

I recently decided I wanted to learn to make traditional British pork pies—specifically, the classic Melton Mowbray pie, which is basically just a whole lot of finely (or coarsely) chopped cuts of pork, cooked in a narrow but tall pie crust. I ordered a dedicated pie tin online, along with a book of savoury pie recipes. My first attempt was tasty, but I did not make it with the traditional aspic that is part of the recipe—a glaring omission, as a handful of people on Facebook observed. To be fair, I’d looked at a bunch of recipes, some of which called for the use of powdered gelatin, while the more involved recipes would have had me boiling pork bones. Given that my access to pork bones in St. John’s is limited, I’d bought the gelatin … and then decided to do a trial run without, just to see about getting the taste right.

I want to try again and do it properly—there’s a small butcher shop just around the corner, and I was planning on popping in there to ask about the whole pork bones thing. But then we had a outbreak of new COVID cases in Newfoundland that put us back into level five lockdown … so there’s no popping into the local butcher’s for a while, anyway.

Meanwhile, I ordered more pie tins—4” across like the original one, but half the height. Which makes for an ideal single-serving pie. Last night I made prime rib for dinner. As I write, four beef and mushroom pies are in the oven. When the lockdown lifts, I’ll return to my project of perfecting the Melton Mowbray pie; until then, I’ll work with the classics.