^include(/Blog Videos/2018-vids/MontrealTrainVictoriaBridge)^ On our way into the ci...

Today the Beav and I took the train into town to see the Alexander Calder show at the MBAM. What...

I'm moving slow enough to see A robin standing on the shoulder Beside the cars, head twisted so, One eye...

There's plenty of folk as'd like a lion as a daemon and they end up with a poodle. And till...

By its end, this trilogy reveals itself to be nothing less than a deep thinking through of the historical consequences...

Don't you know? The world says it's fucking name to us. –Charlier Udder, Deadwood ...

I don't wanna open my eyes but you can go ahead and kiss me if that's what you fucking do....

I am distressed and angry and seem for the moment to be taking this out on your ear. – Hearst,...

Bullock just stared. And then turned and walked away. — Deadwood ...

Always superfluous bloodshed…. The deeper damage is best. – Jack, Deadwood ...

Do not come and try to murder me in my sleep. And I will not come and try to murder...

Kid yourself about your behaviour and you'll never learn a fucking thing. –Swearengen, Deadwood ...

Every fucking day takes figuring out again how to live. –Jane, Deadwood ...

It’s been awhile since I’ve read something, liked it for the first few chapters, but then chapter by chapter liked...

Fuck the fucking new. –E. B., Deadwood...

The second book in The Broken Earth trilogy shifts the narrative in ways that I found disorienting for the first...

Let us give thanks. – Mrs. Bullock, Deadwood ...

Going wrong is not the end of fucking things, Johnny. –Dan, Deadwood ...

Change ain't looking for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to. – Swearengen, Deadwood ...

November and December years ago, I was watching Deadwood and trying to find ways to express how incredible the script...

I stumbled across a reference to The Snow Leopard a year and a half ago reading something somewhere about Buddhism....

So this movie came out and was a bit of a thing and so I watched it (over three or...

This post should have been called "Back to Mac." I'm out of practice and making religious metaphors when I should...

I think of wild animals in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing—not just from the wild, but from people's...

A year ago, I made the leap from Mac to PC by buying the pieces and building myself a gaming...

Is there a call for the vote?...

These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to...

When I think of cyborgs, I think of metal men, bodies run through with hardware and silicon. Sometimes, if I'm...

Their Is discord In this play. Between all The characters. ...

A few years ago, I had my first-year research writing students work on the Martian rover missions for their end-of-semester...

To live is to war with trolls. — Henrik Ibsen ...

Every society contains its monsters: people damaged or disturbed enough, or misdirected enough, to inflict cruelty on others. A central...

The news hasn't been talking about anything else for days and yesterday there were lines hundreds of people long as...

The bugs are gone in the woods and there's work to be done. So the Beav, me, his sister and...

This spring my garden asked to become a pumpkin patch and I said "sure" because why not? Now months later,...

A Quebec Government poster hung on bulletin boards around school since the beginning of term shows a young man in...

Imagine: Ted is a gorilla not a teddy bear. Imagine: Walberg is The Rock and not from Boston. Leave the...

This movie is so much better than Prometheus, and, as my brother said to me over the summer, it makes...

And as a follow-up to my last post, my wild guess is that this op-ed was written by a Pence...

The New York Times has just posted an anonymous editorial by an "senior official" inside the White House claiming to...

The darkness of this movie isn't in the villain-protagonist's victory. It isn't in the deaths of major characters. It isn't...

Last year when my Mom visited for Thanksgiving—Canadian Thanksgiving, in October, not the American holiday in November—we decorated my newly...

A little time with you is all that I get. — Daft Punk ...

Vita sine litteris mors es. (Life without study is death.) –San Felipe Neri, San Miguel de Allende ...

The last time I was in Mexico was in 2013. Presidential elections were underway, but I didn't really pay attention,...

A memory from Mexico....

The Templo de la Concepción in San Miguel de Allende is a dirty and battered little church nudged up against...

I stare about me, trying to etch into this journal the sense of Shey that is so precious, aware that...

The Buddhist notion of Karma isn't about payback. It's about the awful reality of being tied up in contingency. We...

How much of how I feel about what's going on in the US a product of feeling powerless in a...

Scientists have discovered a new method for chatting live and in 3D. It's called drinking coffee with someone! It involves...

Octavia Butler’s novel tells of a modern black woman, drawn back through time to save a slave owner’s young son...

Elizabeth Kostova’s novel is a baroque return to and elaborate reimagining of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, only this time without any...

The news from South of the Border (yes, that's you, US of A) now operates exclusively in a rhetorical mode...

This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the...

Crawling under Electric fence Isn't easy, but he's too short To step over. Barbed wire's better: He can push it...

Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints,...

The worn trail leading past the cow fence to the pond Lay between the live oak and the old woman's...

The old woman talks her way around the pond slowly, speaking as Her eyes and hands jump about. The boy...

The small boy asked to dig a hole. So they gave him a shovel, Showed him a place under The...

He remembers everything, Even the good stuff. The gray veined wood of the porch. The bright sun on the summer...

In the final months and weeks of the 90s—a gentler time when the Internet was still the Web—I stumbled across...

Ruskin would have hated this book as pathetic fallacy pushed to the far reaches of decadence. Many of my students...

When my mother came up last year, I bought her the first book in Louise Penny’s series of murder mysteries....

Marvel does Inception. Sigh. If there had been even one more episode, I wouldn't have finished. But I got to...

It's spring at last, and walking through Saint-Lambert last week, I saw a lawn that was all flower and no...

A one man show in which Alexander the Great, on his deathbed, offers a chronological history of his military campaigns...

The enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience...

The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease. — Marianne Moore ...

The best moment of Spring....

…if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with...

The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they...

A marriage comedy set in a world in which witches and future tech are at war with each other. The...

The poster image for this season is awkward, unattractive, and confused. I look at it and all I see is...

Yesterday I wrote about my TV watching in my log for Transparent. Rereading today I realize I may have given...

I hate the act of watching television: the weekly schedule, the commercials, the hassle of figuring out what's on, the...

Carson McCullers is interested in the feelings and the states of understanding of adolescents and other marginal people who are...

Frankly, a person too dull to look up at the sky and see a parade of tortoises or a huge...

I experienced this book like a delirium. This is the Antebellum West, the Civil War and Reconstruction viewed through the...

This book is populated by characters that became real to me as I watched them live for forty years or...

The idea for this book is straightforward: cull the biographical material for enough details to describe a typical work day...

It’s been a long time since I’ve taught a book where the gap between how much I loved it and...

I was impressed by two things about this book. The first is that, in an effort to get things right...

I'd used Macs throughout high school school but, for reasons of cost, had always had PCs through university. I didn't...

The first season of this show started out as_The Matrix_ and ends up as Fight Club. As crazy as it...

This history of the Antebellum period is complex and breathtaking. The country changed so much in these years that Polk’s...

I read this book in a rush, caught up in the world and the characters. This is great fantasy writing....

A reboot of The Matrix with Freedom standing in for The Real World and Keanu Reeves played by an autistic....

I don't really love this film. I maybe don't even really like it. Mostly I just don't care. The problem...

I meant to do this earlier in the week, but never had a chance. So in a rush, here’s my...

I stumbled across the name of this book and its author in the opening anecdote of a magazine article a...

On “Boy in a Red Waistcoat” by Cézanne. Imagine: Blue lines and mottled yellow planes, A horned block of red...

“It's amazing what thoughts you have at the hairdresser.” ...

It's been quiet around here the past six months but I intend to start rambling about books and movies again....

It's been a long time since I've watched something that left me as excited about art and cinema, storytelling and...