Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Heart, is for posts that make us feel.
ean Vanier’s Becoming Human serves as an excellent companion piece to Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget which I reviewed earlier this month. You may recall Lanier’s thesis: in creating software that facilitates online interaction, designers often contribute to alienating experiences because they fail to give prior thought to the question of what it means to be human.
The reed leans into the windas if listening for a secret,an image which stirs the eye withinthe eye within, and no less real for the fact that it happened hereat a pine table in a suburbankitchen with not a reed for miles,but a pen poised over a scratch pad leaning, steep, like a reed into…
cash grabs and glad rags feed bags and grab bags old nags and plastic blow flies and jujubes If Freud had been Japanese,would free association have ledto the penis? Why not to the tongue?Or to a flip of the middle finger?Both potent in their own ways,and mightily accessible. keen tools and old fools big screens…
Instead of staring at the damn thing, why didn’t Keats look inside the urn? Maybe he would have found candies or cigarette butts. Instead he just went on and on about sylvan lovers chasing one another around the outside.
Here is a story which Thich Nhat Hanh recounts in his book, The Art of Power:
They’ve widened highway 69up through Parry Sound.Now perched high on outcropsand staring from their rocky ledgesare the Inukshuks,granite rubble stacked,legs, torso, arms and head.“We are here” (we think they say),a testament to thosewho set them there,a good host with arms wide,or maybe a guide to point the way. I am the bones of my mother,Laurentia,…
A while ago, Vanessa Wells invited me to lead a poetry workshop with her grade 11/12 English class. My mission, should I choose to accept, was simple. She wanted me to demonstrate a few basic ideas…
how great the fallcrashing down around my headhow great the dread i feelwhen winter breathes her first chillacross the landthe great hoar undresses gnarled limbsthen laughs her limpid taunts how i hate her voicethe icy screech of it grates on my brainit bodes a pernicious nothingthe mind asleeptoo tired even to dreamthe swirl of flakes…
My therapist asked me:What are you thinking?I said: Nothing.My therapist said to me:No one thinks nothing;there’s always a new thoughtmoiling to the surface.So I made something upand she pretended to be pleased. My therapist asked me:What does it mean?I said: Nothing.My therapist said to me:Doesn’t matter what you tell me–even your grocery list–it all has…
“There’s a hint of -”“Pepper,” you say.“Exactly,” and the steward bobslike those dipsomaniac birdswhile I swirl, sniff, sip.I tilt as if for shots.Yay or nay, or checkbox,or I approve, then a jetof purplish juiceinto the canister. I pride myself on the subtletiesI hear in orchestration:violas from within the strings,they rise and then they sing,they sing…
The situation that forms the narrative for this poem struck me as funny and inherently Canadian. I thought I’d be spontaneous and order something I’d never had before. But when the waitress delivered the dish, I realized I couldn’t eat it. The problem is dermatitis herpetiformis, a gluten allergy that leads to mindbending itchiness.
Arrived 8:30 a.m. and the first thing I saw after coming through customs was a pair of police officers dressed in Kevlar and carrying automatic weapons.
Obsolescence isn’t just an economic ploy to promote consumption, nor is it just a cause among many causes for environmental despoliation. Obsolescence is an attitude. The prevalence of this attitude is evidence of the contempt we bear for our own memories.
The Soloist, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, tells the story of L.A. Times columnist, Steve Lopez, and schizophrenic musician, Nathanial Ayers. The film is based on Steve Lopez’s book titled The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music.
I have been thinking about the personality of numbers. Until this moment, it never occurred to me that most people think of numbers only as tools for cataloguing quantity. But numbers have a distinctive life outside the numerically bland universe of human beings.