July 2011
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Poem "Tantalus"
Here’s a poem that occurred to me the other night. I’ve been paring it down since then. It’s more an image than a complete thought, but I quite like the premise: indifference to suffering endlessly prolonged. That’s the most captivating thing about notions of eternal punishment as expressed through legends like Tantalus’. What do they do with boredom and...
June 2011
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Twitter Makes Life Better (Pt. 1)
A friend of mine shared a Thought Catalog post that traces our appropriations of people’s personae through brief glances at their Twitter feeds. It was pretty good.
One line stuck out. With respect to Twitter… “It’s better than Facebook. Because at least you don’t have to see photo albums of fat people from your high school getting married.”
That struck me as...
May 2011
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Hot and Bold
So I’m walking down the hall, enjoying my coffee, and reflecting on what I’d reply were someone to ask what my preferences in a cup of joe were.
“Hot and bold” was my response to this hypothetical query, to which I was immediately compelled to add “…just like I like my ladies”. This crassness isn’t my fault. I am, after all, a product of the...
April 2011
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Today I made a mental list of every relationship or serious romantic prospect I’ve ever had and why it failed.
Upon close inspection, nine tenths of the reason most of them foundered was my own immaturity and its outgrowths.
My question: to have a real, functioning, permanent relationship, do I have to become more mature or does the strength of connection overcome that consideration?
March 2011
1 post
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February 2011
1 post
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January 2011
4 posts
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Today I had an idea for a screenplay I want to write. I really like this one too, but I don’t have time to put it to paper. There’s a lot on my plate right now.
This has happened before. Had I world enough and time, there are probably three or four screenplays, novels, and clusters of short stories I’d be working on. But writing stuff is so time consuming. If you really have...
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Sex and Love Among the Misanthropes
On sex and love: “Don’t think I don’t understand… I mean, what can any one of us ever really fuckin’ hope for, huh? Except for a moment, here and there, with a person who doesn’t want to rob, steal, or murder us? At night—mayhap sunup—one person against the fuckin’ wall, the other, mayhap, on the fucking bed, trusting each other enough to tell...
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Epitaph for My Twenty-Somethings
“Shame and anxiety had marked Bill’s face. Already the skin was pouched and creased. If this was how he looked at twenty-five, at fifty he would bear a face pleated like the tunic of a Roman Senator. Asleep, he appeared younger. But asleep his eyes, which justified the wreck of his face, counted for nothing.” -David...
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The N-Bomb. Those damn Neutrinos... →
Well, I’m sure everyone’s seen this garbage floating around in the last few days. Fortunately it’s popped up in a lot of places, which means there’s probably enough outrage out there to keep most editors from following NewSouth’s example.
Aside from my obvious distaste for the school of thought that likes to make these kinds of ill-advised emendations, the way the...
December 2010
2 posts
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The process of melancholy: “the bereaved abuses himself constantly but indulges in narcissism and refuses to put his energy to profitable use.” -Armann Jakobsson
Having read this while writing a laborious term-paper, I can’t help but notice some similarities…
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Thanks, Genius
If I might take note of an extremely annoying phenomenon…
PC users, ever shared a computer-issue with a friend only to have them respond “You wouldn’t have that problem if you had a Mac”?
Thanks, genius.
I feel like this piece of wisdom is akin to someone walking into a cancer-ward and saying “Gee, I bet you’d be able to survive this if you could afford...
October 2010
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So. I’m single as of this September and I’ve had some time to process things a little. Since sleep is slow coming just now, I figured I’d share what I’ve been thinking.
My concern is this: I’m a deeply affectionate person. (Lately words like “cornball” have been surfacing in reference to me…) I really enjoy intimacy and the process of coming to...
September 2010
2 posts
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Metaphor Without Referent
This latest poem came about after I took a look at an image of Brueghel’s The Tower of Babel. Only after I wrote the rough outline did it occur to me that I was ripping off the concept from W.H. Auden’s “Musee Des Beaux Arts”. He’s one of my favourites, so let’s chalk it up to influence rather than plagiarism… In any case, I hope you enjoy Brueghel’s...
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Whenever I break up with someone, I start inadvertently thinking about the Israeli peace process.
(I think it has something to do with people in entrenched positions, fundamentally unable to communicate in a way that leads to reconciliation.)
In any case, the CBC’s As it Happens had a segment featuring Gideon Levy, outspoken Israeli journalist with a strictly anti-occupation perspective....
August 2010
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Return in Blue
Well, I’m home from a summer of work and work and trips and work and trips. (in that order)
Just now my girlfriend’s not home, I don’t want to work, and I’m feeling sad at leaving my best friend behind in Calgary. I haven’t seen him in years and it was an amazing visit. It leaves me a little desolate to know I might not see him again for quite some time.
It’s a real blessing to have people with...
June 2010
2 posts
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I can’t remember the first time I looked at a world map, but I have a clear memory of the first time I felt awed by an epic landscape. That’s dangerous, I think.
What it means is that we’ve become instinctively programmed to think of the world in terms that we can define and contain within our mental grasp. It means we have to artificially learn, against our now-instinctive...
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Filing Poem
I wrote this poem while filing at the Dictionary of Old English, a process that’s a fairly obvious influence on my thinking herein. I’m not as depressed as it sounds, though. I promise. Enjoy!
What are these things we do That take our lives? We’re agents acted on And then surprised When we are ended, Finished and undone, Emptied in the fullness of our works.
***
A paradoxical...
May 2010
1 post
(Un)pleasant Smells
There are a handful of conventionally unpleasant smells that I really enjoy.
One is gasoline. The reason for that one is easy to identify, though. It reminds me of summers up at my extended family’s cabin north of Lake Superior. Images of gassing up the tin-bottomed fishing-boat for a morning on the lake always mist through my mind whenever I smell it.
Skunk appeals. I think that’s...
April 2010
9 posts
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Easily Pleased
I love being easily pleased.
Today, after a long day of terribly arduous writing, I was cheered simply by the thought of how awesome it is to have opposable digits.
I think it means that even if I’ve spent 2 years pounding through a thesis on generic theory in medieval Germanic literature, I’ll still be able to come home, take in the clumsily expressed sentiment of a Ridley Scott...
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English 257
Lately I’ve been obsessing over the idea of teaching a course, a really specific one with very little practical application. That goes without saying. It’s the kind of course that you only get to teach once you’re embedded in a faculty long enough to make ridiculous demands of your program.
I want to call it “Mythic America: North American Self-Consciousness in Literature...
Boy: Can you please stop name-dropping philosophers so you sound intellectual? It makes you seem pretentious.
Girl: I've tried but I just Kant.
Boy: ...
I was recently running through my archive, looking for a video that I needed to share, and remembered this old post.
Whenever I think about the magnitude of the universe and the time it would take to travel through it, I’m struck with profound awe and bitter envy.
The awe is the awe of the sublime, like the sort you get in the presence of mountains or the heavy sea. It’s my favourite...
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Lolitist Linguistics
I was having a chat with my linguist friends today and we decided something. “Nubile” is simply the sexiest word in the English language.
Nubile.
The growling nasal entry through the “n” just hints at masculine sexual desire, and the sloping diphthong of the “u” is just rounded enough to evoke a sinuous curve that rounds out in that fleshy bilabial plosive:...
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Just in Case →
Just in case you disagreed with my last foray into cultural criticism, I’m going to ask you to read this n+1 article and then I’ll say no more about it.
For the record, I disagree with Lorentzen’s assessment of The Life Aquatic. It just wouldn’t be n+1 if I agreed with everything they said!
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Culture Watch!
The next major trendies will be called “tripsters”. Trippy hipsters
Their cultural narrative? Ageing and disillusioned with the cynicism and artless negativity of Hipsterdom, young people will react by aligning themselves with the last trend to wholeheartedly embrace (avowedly superficial) idealism: Hippyhood.
Attributes of Tripsterdom include: a love of nature built onto the...
March 2010
11 posts
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Spring gets me thinking about vegetable fecundity and wanderlust. Since both are more or less relegated to my fantasy life right now, I’ve been imagining the former since it’s more tangible and my enjoyment of it is much more static. That means while I’m reading and typing in my squalid surroundings, I can imagine myself in the Wordsworthian comfort of vibrantly placid plant...
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My girlfriend has the charming tendency of mutilating my name by coming up with various fun appellations. There’s Alexei, Lexinton, Lexie, and the list goes on…
Today, she came up with Lexifer.
If we were to unpack that name etymologically, it would mean “bearer of words”, in the same way that “Christopher” means “carrier of Christ” and Lucifer...
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Easily Entertained
Three things I like to do with my phone while I’m walking down abandoned hallways: 1. Pretend it’s a handheld phaser from Star Trek, poised in case anyone comes around the corner. 2. Pretend it’s a starship flying through the cavernous interior of a massive asteroid. As a slide phone, it opens to allow the deployment of fighter aircraft. 3. Text people.
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Two incredible songs: Elliot Smith’s “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands” and Wolf Parade’s “I’ll Believe in Anything”, a song that resolves with the escalating refrain “nobody knows you, and nobody gives a damn either way.” The former is profoundly depressing and the latter, probably one of the most uplifting songs I’ve ever heard.
...
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My Perception is a Late Bloomer
There’s a certain category of actress I can think of. They go for years without turning my head and then act one role that makes them irresistible.
A few that spring to mind… Uma Thurman in Kill Bill Emma Thompson in Stranger than Fiction Julia Roberts, patronizing Jude Law in her photo studio in Closer Meryl Streep in Adaptation, probably because she’s playing a bitchy and...
Artist, Progress and Process →
I don’t have too much to add to this article, other than the fact that everyone should read it.
A couple of waystones: Marco Roth’s treatment of theatrical identity, the notion that interaction leaves us all “wondering whether all sex isn’t ‘simulated sex’ or all conversation isn’t simply a series of ‘theatrical’ gestures meant to showcase something...
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Antarcticus →
This article makes me wish we were still an etiological myth-making culture while we were exploring the world with scientific precision. I can only imagine the story that might be produced to explain Antarctica’s bleeding glacier.
Here’s my suggestion: There once was a massive giant. He was badly wounded in a fight with the gods and fled to the bottom of the world. The giant lamented...
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Three rhymes I’m officially banning from pop music: 1. “Night” and “right” (or any derivative therefrom). 2. Any two compound words where “self” is the second element. 3. “Boys and girls” and “around the world”.
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An Honest Query
I can remember many conversations that centre around gorgeous couples. “They’ll have such beautiful children,” a girl will say.
In those situations I’m generally thinking, “I bet they have really hot sex.”
Is this merely a difference of gender-perspective or do I have a potentially harmful fixation?
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Ballad of a Balding Man
Styling a receding hairline every morning is a challenge. You’ve got to walk a middle way between two extremes. The first is that of styling your hair so it’s obvious you’re trying to conceal your baldness. The second is to inadequately conceal your baldness.
Other categories for which this kind of moderation is necessary: physical fitness and professional ambition. Otherwise...
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February 2010
10 posts
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Published Cremation
I’m reading a book about funerary remains from burial sites in early Medieval England. It’s about as exciting as it sounds…
But, the author makes reference to studies of particular burials, both inhumations and cremations. In describing buried urns that have been archaeologically discussed in scholarly journals, he uses the term “published cremations”. I feel like a...
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I propose a new adjective, set forth for your semantic pleasure and utility.
Simplicit. Adj. 1. Simply explained; laid out clearly, according to one or few lines of reasoning. 2. antiquated usage: as if explained by an “idiot” or simpleton. cf. simple; explicit, implicit.
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To my missed connection…
Coming out of the vegan restaurant at Bloor and Spadina; 2PM on Friday the 19th.
You had a cozy, preworn pullover over a plaid Urban Outfitters shirt. Floppy toque and thick-rimmed glasses and just the right amount of stubble for your thickset jaw. Your jeans had paint on them… just enough that it didn’t look grubby or accidental, but sufficient to...
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I have what’s called a blenderface. It’s the wonderful blessing of composite features. Almost everyone I meet tells me about some friend that I profoundly resemble. It garners early overfamiliarity, which in turn helps foster personal confidence. Advantageous.
In any case, I wonder how many times a hitman has almost shot me from a rooftop on that account, only to realise his error at...
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There are many disabilities I understand. Tonedeafness is not one of them.
I’m continually fascinated and flabbergasted by the sound of someone singing along to a beautiful piece of music with complete atonality. How can someone be totally unaware of their own lack of harmony, and plough on in spite of it?
Perhaps the desire to sing is greater than the need for precision.
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Almost two years ago, my girlfriend and I stole a sprout waiting to be planted from an underground food court in downtown Toronto. As a joke, we called it our love-plant.
In spite of its ironic nomination, I still get excited when it sprouts a new stalk.
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Today at Dark Horse Cafe, their sidewalk sandwich-board read as follows: “Show your support for Canadian Olympic athletes with an Italian drink made from only the finest Brazilian beans.”
A finely tuned sense of irony that rubs well against Canadian campaigns from certain, very American multinationals. (Although their sentiment regularly makes me tear up. I’m emotionally...
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Richard Hogg’s keen assessment of linguistic scholarship: “…unfortunately, the results are rewarding in inverse proportion to the complexity.”
Ouch.
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One day soon we will all walk around with little compters surgically implanted on the undersides of our wrists.
When I get mine, the first program I’ll get is a dictionary hub that acts as an access point to any lexicon, living or dead.
Next in line is that creepy iphone app where you can follow people around the city on Google maps.
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Apparently, one in every 18 people in the world live along the Yangtze river.
Concept: a short story that follows the life of a water molecule as it traverses the river, observing human life. His journey would be a descent into disillusionment analogous to the gradual pollution and loss of energy that occur in a river’s lower reaches.
January 2010
22 posts
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If I May Wax Wistful for a Moment
Love is a dangerous activity for Lovers.
When I say Lovers, I refer to that very specific group of people who treat their affection as though its sheer existence justifies total dedication. The Lover’s adherence can only be described in the terms of religous or political zealotry. Once believed, the emotion is an absolute fact, and informs the perception of every experience.
What happens...