Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
My understanding is that Karens throughout the American South still assert the right to go maskless. Presumably street photography in places like Houston and Tallahassee has not yet assumed an after-time look. That might change once all the Karens have died…
The skipping rope was made of green and pink plastic and had tassels at either end. It was long, the kind of skipping rope girls used in the playground at recess.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
A piece in the Guardian made light of Yukon signs that advise residents to social distance by keeping one caribou apart or, in the absence of caribou, four ravens. Ah, those crazy Canucks! If you read to the end of the article, you’ll note some standard Toronto measures, too. Keep one hockey stick apart or,…
The latest instalment in my pandemic reading list speaks to all arts organization who find themselves in a state of limbo: Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel.
I hate the thought of spending good money on a new lens and not using it. So, instead of stalking wildlife in Toronto’s ravines, I’ve played Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, propping my gear on a tripod and waiting to see what happens in neighbouring buildings.
Douglas Coupland announced that his pet dog had died of Covid-19. I was a reporter at the presser and smirked when he started to cry. Other reporters scowled at me and accused me of being heartless and insensitive.
Let’s bust up this concrete lockdown and hurry back to going nowhere.
Already, we engage in public conversations about returning to normal life. More than 350 years ago, the people of London learned a hard lesson which screams to us down the centuries: do not do this!