Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
When I was seven, I ran home from school every day so I could watch Batman foil one of the criminals who routinely plagued Gotham City. As often as not, Batman didn’t have to do anything because his bungling foes got caught up in their own schemes at which point Batman, played by the inimitable…
A couple years after my dad completed an M.Ed. at Syracuse University, a colleague of his enrolled in the same program and, like my dad, uprooted his wife and children for the duration. I remember going to visit them over the winter holidays, driving past the jerry-built townhouses where we had lived, then on to…
I have a special pile of books, purchased with the best of intentions, which nevertheless go unread. What lurks in the background is, perhaps, a species of gluttony. I want to read everything. I want to swallow it whole, digest it, ruminate until I pass it into my second stomach, break it down and draw…
People in Toronto are fortunate because the city has grown up over a network of ravines that provide easy escape from the usual urban traumas of concrete and vertigo.
After lunch, I ran across the road to get a few things for supper and as I stepped through the entrance to the mall, I noticed an older man lying on the floor stretched out on his side. In particular, I noted his blue mask which gave an odd splash of colour to an otherwise…
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.
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.”
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.
Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It by Jennifer Michael Hecht (Yale University Press, 2013) is an odd book. It’s odd in that there seems to be a divide between what it claims to be and what it is. Note that I didn’t say it’s a bad book. It’s a good book. But it’s not the book it thinks it is.
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.
This is a poetic response to some passages I read in The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness, a memoir by Karen Armstrong.
Mad Pride Week finished more than a week ago. I had intended to write a piece on it but couldn’t find a hook. Until yesterday, that is, when two very different stories trended all over the social media universe. One story from the UK: soul singer, Amy Winehouse, had died at the age of 27.
We first meet in the smoking lounge. Ward 3C. Psychiatric. The only place in the hospital where you’ll find a smoking lounge.
It gets better. At least that’s what Dan Savage says, and he’s persuaded millions of people to repeat it often enough that it sounds true. He—and they—and I—want teens and twenty-somethings who are struggling with issues of sexuality and identity to bear up under the burden of loneliness and hatred; we want them to look beyond the immediate fear of bullying to a time in the not-too-distant future when they will feel free enough to be themselves in the open.
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…