Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
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.
Following Jaron Lanier’s advice, I’ve taken a summer sabbatical from social media. His advice comes from his latest book, Who Owns The Future? I’m pleased to report that, as promised in his book, the curtailing of my social media habits has not resulted in any nasty consequences.
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.
Fifty years ago, Mircea Eliade published Myth and Reality in which he explored the function of myth in a wide-ranging sample of cultures and religious contexts. His writing cut across the traditionally established boundaries that divide a number of disciplines: anthropology, history, religious studies, cultural studies.
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.
One of the things I like to do here at nouspique is pay homage to instances of extraordinary prescience. One such instance came forty years ago from the late Michael Crichton with his film, Westworld.
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 …
It would be easy to select poetry that assumes a prophetic/righteous/angry tone, especially in light of the Harper government’s policies around exploitation of the Alberta tar sands and dismantling of environmental controls. However, Anand and Dickinson have made selections that frame things in positive terms.
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.