Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Elbow, is for posts that make us laugh.
Since David Gilmour’s idiotic remarks of last week, there have been many clever responses, but the cleverest by far comes from a source that predates Gilmourgate by a few weeks: the novella, A, by André Alexis, published earlier in September by Bookthug.
I just got back from a road trip with my dad. We drove the northern route through Ontario i.e. we started on Yonge Street in Toronto and pointed the car north. Theoretically, if you keep your foot on the accelerator and don’t hit a moose, a couple days later you’ll end up in Rainy River on the Minnesota border.
All down the street we’d been fighting ’til we passed the drug store where Mandy saw the ads in the window and they reminded her that she was having a certain female problem with itchiness so she told me to wait outside with the dog while she ran inside to buy whatever it was she needed that was advertised on special in the window.
A: Yeah, well, I’ve learned a thing or two in my travels, you know (which, incidentally, are far more extensive than yours), and one of those things I’ve learned is a word, a simple word, and you wanna know what that word I’ve learned is? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s cant.
Now I know (and from personal experience) that the way a girl looks in a 320 by 240 pixel photo posted on a dating site and the way she looks in a coffee shop on Queen Street on a Thursday evening can be two completely different … uh … ways.
He shoved me into his change room and the plywood door swung shut like a coffin lid. I wriggled out of my jacket and trousers and imagined I was Harry Houdini locked in a cage suspended over a raging river.
Against my better judgment, I go up with the woman to her apartment. Objectively speaking, it’s, like, a smart thing to do. The woman is clever, fun, good-looking and (most important of all) eager.
Thirteen is a horrible age to be a boy. Your testicles are developed enough to make demands on you. But the rest of you is sufficiently immature that you can’t do much about it. Thirteen year old girls are already young women—with airs and wiles and the beginnings of sexual instincts. They have no interest in thirteen year old testicles.
Niels Bohr had nine items, one too many for the express line, so he had to wait in a regular line behind a woman with five snot-nosed kids and two buggies overflowing with groceries. Bohr wondered if something had happened to the space-time continuum to make his wait in line seem more interminable than it already was.
It started with a three-day blackout. They got the grid online again, but never back to the way it was. From then on, there were rolling blackouts, at least a couple hours each day. There was talk of crumbling infrastructure, but that was only half the problem.
Poor Justin Bieber. He’s taking it hard for the comment he wrote in the guestbook at Anne Frank House: Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber. It’s tempting to call him a twit. To say he doesn’t get it. That he’s disrespectful. Yeah. But on the other hand …
Through an act of subterfuge, Mandy got Lloyd into emerge. She sat him down in a waiting room of scraped knees and moaning bandaged heads and said she had to go to the counter and request an old x-ray she’d forgotten to pick up.
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.
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.
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.