Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Last week, I posted an image of Northrop Frye with a dump of snow on his head. I forgot to mention that Northrop Frye’s statue has a neighbour: Al Purdy’s statue sits across the road in Queen’s Park. Norrie and Al can’t see each other, and for three reasons.
Kevin, do you remember our tripto the Science Centre when we stoodat our separate consoles playing tictac toe against the computer?Monolith displays half-way acrossthe gallery, light-bulb arrayslike movie marquees while vacuumtubes chugged out the next moves?And you said you had a friendsmarter’n me, betchure life,who come here one time an’ beat it.And I said, in…
Northrop Frye was chancellor of Victoria University when I was an undergrad student doing my English degree there. He cast a spell over the campus, and some of that magic lingers.
I’m writing a novel (tentatively titled Life In The Margins). It’s about sex, murder and systematic theology. Seriously. I’m offering a romp through the world of systematic theology, presenting it unto others as I wish it had been presented unto me.
I can’t remember in what bin or bag I found this report, written under the auspices of Allan Gotlieb and submitted to then Minister of Communications, The Honourable Eric Kierans.
The last time I was in Edinburgh, I dropped in to the Scottish Poetry Library and picked up a copy of The Poem Goes To Prison, edited by Kate Hendry. This is an anthology of poems selected by prisoners for prisoners. It was curated by Kate Hendry while she was teaching at HMP Barlinnie, Scotland’s largest prison, located just outside Glasgow.
once upon a timean emergent timean Ecclesiastes timea rising sun time that shines warm on the cheeksa fresh time blossoming from the emptiness and greening into historyan epochal timea seasonal timea calendrical timea time of minutiae ticking left wrist shackled timea global market shekel timea metred timea banging bongo timea pulsing time of poems and…
It’s the same old capitalist story. A small startup crowd-sources its content. Behemoth gobbles it up with a hefty payout to the owners of the startup … and nothing to the content creators.
Let’s say you like to write noir or bizarre or absurd. Let’s say you like to craft tales that plumb the psycho-sexual depths, that skirt along the limits of human behaviour. But let’s say you’ve run out of ideas.
In his 2011 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Warren Buffett offered some wisdom on gold as an investment option. For some reason, that little section of his letter (which you can download here as a pdf document – see page 18) has gained renewed interest in the media.
At least once a week, I resolve to be a more disciplined blogger. It’s a weaker version of the New Year’s resolution. So, for example, I felt a twinge of it at the end of December and created a reading list: I would read a whack of books and blog about each of them.
It appears that more than 91% of all people pick their nose. I’m not sure about the research methodology used to arrive at that statistic, but I’m willing to accept the figure with verifying it independently. The statistic means that if you’ve got working digits, then you’re sticking them up your nose on pretty much a daily basis.
Yesterday, I tweeted: “BBC reports a woman was ”gang-raped” in India. What, pray tell, do the quotation marks mean?” I was responding to a BBC headline concerning a Swedish tourist whose husband was beaten and tied, then forced to watch as a group of men raped her.
Our next case study concerns a young man named M. who presented at his family physician’s office complaining of symptoms consistent with a major depressive episode. The physician referred him to a psychiatrist, Dr. N., who prescribed Zoloft and implemented a biweekly course of psychotherapy.
When Canadians do the hokey-pokey, that’s what it”s all aboot. Can someone please tell me what it’s all aboot-er-about that there’s a proliferation of (American) TV shows that invent and then ridicule their invented version of the way Canadians speak? As a Canadian, I’ve never once said aboot.