Tom and George sat on the low stone wall and watched how the tear gas, looking for all the world like tufts of cotton, scudded along the street and vanished through the trees in the park.
Author: David Barker
Matthew Hayley #MentalHealthIsVisible
It was strange going out with my camera this morning. I feel like a bear crawling out from hibernation. The light seems too bright. And, god, I’m hungry.
Swing Time, by Zadie Smith
The title shares its name with a 1936 musical featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. One of the numbers is a Jerome Kern tune “Bojangles of Harlem” in which Astaire appears in blackface.
Migraine Headaches and Transient Aphasia
On two occasions, as I feel the aura coming on, I’ve sat down with pen and paper to document my impressions. I’ve reproduced those episodes below, preserving the spelling exactly as I recorded it. They illustrate the progression from coherence to incoherence.
Sleeping Rough in the Time of Covid-19
It’s easy to overlook the possibility that medical guidance is entrenched within or is an expression of middle-class values. But those things we expect of people—self-isolation, social distancing, masks, hand-washing—are not possible for many people.
Nature Photography: The New Normal
There is a sense in which virtually every animal on the planet is domesticated. The cage bars aren’t obvious, but all animals roam inside the confines of a giant zoo and we are their mostly negligent zookeepers.
Covid-19, God, and Aliens
The longer I listened to him, the more I felt like Woody Allen talking to Annie Hall’s younger brother (Christopher Walken) at the family dinner when he cut him off and said: “I’m due back on the planet Earth.”
Suffering Photography
I grew up in the chilly arms of the Protestant work ethic which is stunningly devoid of grace. You can only deserve what you merit. In the photographic world, that means an image can’t be truly good unless the photographer suffered in its making.
Pale Fire
If the scene suggests a story, it isn’t for me to advance it; that task falls to the viewer. My work was done the instant I released the shutter.
Story: Herman
Apart from the tire swing, there was nowhere but the ground for Herman to sit, so he spent most of his waking hours with his legs thrust through the middle of the tire, winding himself clockwise until he could go no further, then unwinding counterclockwise until the spinning nearly made him vomit.
Bathed In Luxury
Bathed In Luxury. This is the tagline of a new condominium residence and hotel under construction on Bloor Street East. I struggle with the word luxury. I struggle with the way it’s used.
The Innocents, by Michael Crummey
Through The Innocents, Michael Crummey creates a microcosm in which the triangle of isolation, innocence and ignorance can be spun out as an allegory which speaks to us precisely in the here and now. He wrote it before Covid-19 so he could not have anticipated its salience to our current situation.
Little Dogs, by Michael Crummey
In these times (not of Covid-19 but of a rising secularism), poetry is the last toehold of spiritual writing. Not that there’s anything explicitly spiritual in Crummey’s writing. But it’s spiritual insofar as it concerns dreams, memory, fathers, the dead, and frail loves.
Poem: Talk of the Town
Orwell observed that the manipulations of language are important to the machinations of power. He observed it in the gradual impoverishment of vocabulary (newspeak). But he only identified half the matter. He failed to note a corresponding impoverishment of musicality in speech.
Dirty Green Apples
There’s something poignant about those green apples all crowded against the dirty window. Who knows where they’ve come from. Some bear wounds. Some yellow in the light.