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...
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When I’m texting and I press 2-6-6-3-7 to type the word “comes”, my cell-phone automatically suggests “boner” instead. Hmm.
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My Cellar Door
“Fundamentally tragic” is one of my favourite phrases in the English language.
It implies that something is defined by entropy at its very foundation. It’s built on collapse. That’s pure and delicious, productive paradox.
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My dream last night involved Kevin Kline as a lecherous but famously brilliant private school teacher with a taste for minors. His amourous attentions centred around a bookishly bespectacled Ellen Page, one of his students. I think she was my sister.
In any case, my whole family and I ended up playing a game of Scrabble in Kline’s oak-clad study. I, wise to his plans to seduce my sister,...
Self-righteousness has its own codes of speech, especially when it pertains to the rejection of culinary indulgence.
If you’re callous enough to ask for unoffered wine—or even something more mundane that’s regularly the object of abstinence, salt for instance—when visiting someone who’s something of a teetotaler, they’ll never respond simply. You would expect...
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Reflection on Perspective
Perspective is a funny thing. You would think that the ability to comprehend multiple perspectives would empower a person, but it seems only to confuse. A really tangible example of this principle struck me today while I was riding the streetcar.
My life from one perspective: I’m tremendously blessed. Growing up in Canada with a middle-class, divorced-but-nurturing family places me in one...
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Three ways to make your day more exciting:
1. Before you leave the house, get an unconventional song stuck in your head to set an unconventional mood. My current earworm is the string leitmotif from Battlestar Galactica that appears whenever some complicated moment of destiny untangles itself. As a result I feel very… fated.
2. Pace incessantly while waiting for things. Coffee, transit,...
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marco:
Take a boring photo with your 50mm f/1.8 prime wide open, with a small sliver of your subject in focus. Leave large portions of the subject outside of the focal plane, regardless of how important or interesting they are.
Rotate the camera 30 degrees before shooting.
Square-crop.
Oversaturate or slightly desaturate. Tint red to look old. Under no circumstances should you apply a...
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Today's Linguistic Conjecture
The word murmer should have an “s” in it somewhere.
Think about every filibuster or dramatic statement ever made in any film. The murmer that runs through the crowd is certainly full of humming the rolling “r”, but there’s a distinct sibilance about it that’s completely underrepresented.
I suggest “smurmer” or “mussermur”.
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Diplomacy
My Korean Girlfriend: I'm gonna put more paprika in this butter chicken.
Me: I really think it's spicy enough.
My Korean Girlfriend: Pleeease?
Me: Ok, but go easy. I'm white.
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L'Ecriture Androgyne
Do you ever read something utterly convinced of the author’s gender, only to have your assessment shattered when you go back and read the writer’s name?
I wonder what establishes the parameters with which we assess male or female writing. Vulnerability? Vigorousness? Spartan style or florid prose? Sentimentalism? Which align with whom?
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The American Declaration of Independence always makes me tear up when I hear it.
As unquestionably flawed as were its draftsmen, it raises a question. When did politicians stop imbuing their product with spirit, sentiment, and good writing?
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The East Asian Studies program at U of T is on the same floor as the Dictionary of Old English where I’m a research assistant.
They have a stuffed cat beside their public chalkboard. They’re currently trying to come up with a name for this impromptu departmental mascot.
The best suggestion so far? Chairman Meow.
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My girlfriend says I don’t include enough paragraph breaks in my blog-posts.
Is that true?
I always thought my bigger problem would be coming across as kind of an ass.
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Preferred Mode of Relationship: Chicago Style
Today’s irksome practice: utilizing the “Friendship Bibliography”.
This is one I’m sure most of you have run across. It’s a favourite argumentative technique of cosmopolitans. I don’t mean the martinis, but the people occupying a specific social demographic. You know these folks: young, primarily white urbanites with hyperliberal sensibilities, usually coming...
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A Question
If there was some benevolent, inventive being in charge of making little modifications to creatures in order to watch them develop according to natural selection, wouldn’t you want that job?
I think it would be fun.
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Really.
A packaging crime: Just opened the socks I got for Christmas. Their plastic packaging had a Ziplock seal. Really? I don’t think I’ve ever had a pair of socks go stale from contact with air, have you?
I want to see the presentation that convinced Fruit of the Loom that that was necessary…
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Artistry and Density
I love art that’s characterized by density. Things that abound with sound and image, are buried in layers.
In music, dripping polyphony and 16th notes with foggy distortion, instruments doubled out of their natural limits. Fleet Foxes and Arcade Fire and Julian Casablancas.
In visuals, sprawling pieces with depth and texture and amiguous subjects. Turner and Everingham and Dore.
In...
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Revising Environmentalism
I’m not an environmentalist or a doomsayer, nor do I lke listening to either type. (I prefer the latter, but only because they’re more literarily interesting.) Still, I feel I need to step in for reasons of accuracy…
There are two primary images associated with environmental eschatology, both inadequate.
First, we seem to think of the planet as a feminized victim, mother earth...
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Today my hands are stained with the oily dust of a leather book bound in 1799.
(By means of a side-project, I had to access the Royal Ontario Museum’s rare book library today.)
Sometimes I forget why I’m willing to undergo the silly rigours of scholastic training, but the stain on my hands reminds me what I loved about this field in the first place: reverence toward ideas bound in...
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History, Humanity →
I like this poem and what it says about our appropriation of history.
It’s dangerous to locate history anywhere along the spectrum of artifact, narrative, entertainment, pastime. In treating history as anything other than a vital mass of emotion and interaction and life, we reduce the chances of true human empathy. We endorse the primacy of examination over interaction.