Category: Culture

Thoughts about culture; arts, music, writing, sculpture, photography and more.

That Fake War on Xmas

Atheism & Spirituality / Christianity / Cults / Culture / Culture wars / Faith / Pop CultureOne Comment

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In my part of Canada the “war on Xmas” begins in September when some local box stores start putting Xmas ornaments and decorations out, sometimes just after Labour Day. By mid-October there are whole store sections dedicated to pushing gaudy, offshore-made, increasingly tacky lights and displays. Then the canned Xmas music starts infecting shoppers through tinny ceiling speakers. Xmas tree lots spring up in mall parking lots. It’s a cultural virus being spread among us. The Resistance (aka me) comes forward to bravely ignore these increasingly strident blandishments. We refuse to purchase any of their wares until at least Remembrance ……… click below for more ↓

Back to Horace

Classics / Musings / Poetry / Poetry & LyricsOne Comment

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During the pandemic lockdowns, I heard a lot of people bemoan their inability to travel; on vacation, to visit relatives, to shop, or just to get out of their homes and see new places. People felt isolated, some went stir-crazy. We are a not merely a culture easily bored with staying in one place: our entire species has wanderlust. Two millennia ago, the poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus — aka Horace — wrote a letter (Epistle I.XI) to his peripatetic friend, Bullatius, a man who travelled the known world looking for contentment. Horace chided him, saying, You can change the colour ……… click below for more ↓

The Science Fiction of Robert Frost

Musings / Poetry / Poetry & Lyrics3 Comments

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Robert Frost was a great American poet, and I’ve enjoyed many of his poems over the decades I’ve been reading poetry. Some are a tad bucolic for my taste, but many also plumb the depths of human emotions so succinctly as to make Frost more universal than simply American. But while he never wrote any science fiction, his words have been used in that genre. Recently I came across a verse in one of Ben Bova’s more recent scifi novels that made me re-appraise and re-read Frost. It was: They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars — ……… click below for more ↓

Yesterday’s Laughs

Culture / Daily life / Family history / Film & Reviews / Musings / Personal Reminiscences3 Comments

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It may be a small conceit to say I was brought up watching the Marx Brothers movies on TV, but there’s some truth in that claim. I remember seeing them on our small, B&W TV set on weekends when my brother and I were allowed to watch the programs of our choice. I also recall seeing the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and others between the cartoons and kids’ shows in the 1950s and ’60s. The Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy were acceptable comedians in my house because, I suppose, they were somewhat more sophisticated comedy. ……… click below for more ↓

The Book of Knowledge: 3

Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / Learning & Education / Media / Musings / Politics / Reading & Literacy / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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Back in the Mesozoic of my life, I came across a quotation from Giacomo Casanova that, as far as I can remember these days, went “No man can know everything, but every man should attempt to.” For many decades, I didn’t know the source, or whether it was misquoted, misattributed, or simply a fake as we experience so often on most internet quote sites (aka clickbait sites). But it stuck with me. I recently found a more fulsome translation of his words from Chapter V of his memoirs: No one in this world can obtain a knowledge of everything, but ……… click below for more ↓

The Book of Knowledge: 1

Books & Reviews / Daily life / Internet & Social Media / Learning & Education / Musings / Pop Culture / Reading & Literacy4 Comments

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When I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, having an encyclopedia in your home was the bee’s knees, to use my grandmother’s phrase. It was a sign of sophistication and learning, of culture and wisdom. And being reasonably well-off, because encyclopedias were not inexpensive. I can still hear Jimminy Cricket singing the song (it’s how I learned to spell encyclopedia). Many school libraries had them, although usually only one set and not always the most current or the best. You could find more sets in the local public library, including in the bigger library branches the vaunted Encyclopedia ……… click below for more ↓

Ars Poetica

Books & Reviews / Classics / Culture / Literature / Poetry / Poetry & Lyrics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Horace’s Ars Poetica, or the Art of Poetry, was written as a 476-line poem in a letter to his friend, the Roman senator  Lucius Calpurnius Piso (Lucius) and his two sons, around 19 BCE. It was known for a time as the “Epistle to the Pisos” until 95CE when the critic  Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (Quintilian) called it the Ars Poetica in his a twelve-volume textbook on rhetoric, the Institutio Oratoria. The name stuck. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) was popular during the Renaissance when Latin was still taught in schools. Some of his poems were among the works students had to ……… click below for more ↓

Smith, Rock, and the Trivialization of Western Culture

Books & Reviews / Culture / Media / Media Issues / Memes; Internet & Social / Musings / Social Order & Disorder / TV / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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If Neil Postman were alive today, sitting in a bar or café with Chris Hedges, I wonder which one would say “I told you so!” first after seeing social media this past week? The story that clogged the social media pipes this week was the slap one actor gave another on stage during the performance of the annual onanism festival called the Oscars. And as soon as it happened, even while it was occurring, a shitstorm of comments, opinions and reportage flooded social media. Every social media feed was clogged with pieces like tarry stercus and then flooded by the ……… click below for more ↓

Kerouac’s Haikus

Books & Reviews / Literature / Musings / Poetry / Poetry & Lyrics / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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Haiku is like a razor blade: small, light, but yet strong and incredibly sharp. Haiku says “Look over there!” and then smacks you from the other side. Haiku is the neutron star of poetry: stunning density combined with astounding brightness. Haiku swims in a sea of metaphor, darting like quick, bright fish among the forest of words. Haiku has a formal definition: “an unrhymed verse form of Japanese origin having three lines containing usually five, seven, and five syllables respectively. It is also described as “a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking ……… click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 30

Cancer / Daily life / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / ShakespeareOne Comment

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The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together… (Shakespeare: All’s Well That Ends Well, Act IV, Sc II.) Elumbated.* It’s an archaic word meaning “weakened in the loins” according to the OED. It apparently derives from the Latin elumbis “having a dislocated hip (from e out + lumbus loin).” I thought that the word itself might be well resurrected to describe someone who had had a radical prostatectomy. Like me: If the cancer is tangled with the nerves, it may not be possible to maintain the nerve function or structure. Sometimes nerves must be cut ……… click below for more ↓

Godzilla, Mechagodzilla, and Kong

Film & Reviews / Godzilla / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Pop Culture3 Comments

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I’m not sure if I should be elated or disappointed after watching Godzilla vs. Kong (GvK), the latest film (2021) in the Legendary/Universal, Godzilla/MonsterVerse saga. That’s Kong, not King Kong, by the way, because of a squabble over licensing rights, but, yes, it’s that Kong in person if not name. The kaiju formerly known as… Almost two hours of Godzilla and the gang onscreen, with tremendous monster fights, should be a delight for any kaiju aficionado (as readers here know I am…), and I always revel in another Godzilla (or Kong) film added to my collection, but I can’t help ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Art and Taste

Arts / Collingwood / Culture / Daily life / Philosophy / Pop CultureOne Comment

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Many years ago, I had a lengthy correspondence with a friend in another part of Canada about what constitutes art. His basic argument was that art was not neutral or generic, but was the final product of high achievement: real art was “good” art. That is, art was defined by recognized masters and their works. Mona Lisa was art, Picasso was art, Monet was art — solely because they hung in galleries. It took cultural recognition or at least acceptance to make the change from simply a “work” to being art, according to my friend. You could, according to his ……… click below for more ↓

More Musings on Shakespeare

Literature / Shakespeare / ShakespeareOne Comment

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The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (edited by Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, Penguin Books, 2002) has a short but insightful essay on the texts of Shakespeare that illustrates the choices editors have made when dealing with the texts they want to present their version to the public. It uses a single, well-known verse from Romeo and Juliet (Act 2, Sc.2, lines 40-44 in the Pelican and many other editions) in which Juliet speaks: What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in ……… click below for more ↓

Killing Commendatore

Books & Reviews / Literature / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I’ve been a fan of Haruki Murakami’s novels for several, recent years, and have read nine or ten of them already. Those I’ve read have all fit into the category of “magical realism”; a style of fiction that was made famous by Latin American authors like Gabriel García Márquez (you would have encountered this in his bestselling book, 100 years of Solitude).* It’s a technique of writing where the imagined, or the fantastic enters the mundane world and is treated as natural. Or as Britannica notes: … the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction. I ……… click below for more ↓

The Serpent Gets a Bad Rap

Fables / FaithLeave a comment

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Why doesn’t anyone ever think of the serpent as humankind’s liberator instead of some villain who got us kicked out of Eden? Why does Eve take the blame for listening to the serpent instead of being considered another hero for taking a bold step to ensure our collective freedom? Okay, I know the whole Genesis-Eden-Adam-and-Eve story is an allegory, and not meant to be taken as fact. But the story pervades Western culture (our literature and art are full of it) so that even a nonbeliever knows the details. The tale has informed religious and social policy for millennia, and ……… click below for more ↓

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