Category: Personal Reminiscences

Racism and the US Civil Rights movement retold

Conspiracy Theories / Media Issues / Personal Reminiscences / US Politics3 Comments

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As I read through Rick Perlstein’s book, Nixonland, about American politics and life in the 1950s and 60s, the Civil Rights movement and the reaction to it by white Americans, the narrative astounds me. Such anger, such violence. Such sadness. It seems like such an alien place, dystopian, almost fictional, like an Orwellian novel. I was, it seems from my reading, not really aware, not fully cognizant of just how bad it was. But then, it looks eerily familiar – some of the photos look just like those taken during the Occupy Wall Street protests. Am I merely juxtaposing my ……… click below for more ↓

Reading, Writing and Memory

Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / My Writing / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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“Memory,” he read the headline as he settled into the armchair, resting his elbows on the wide arms to expand the National Post paper to its fullest, “declines much slower in people who read, write throughout life.” Ah. Interesting. He peered closer. “Reading books, writing letters and working on crossword puzzles throughout life may help preserve the brain’s memory faculties and fend off Alzheimer’s disease and early-onset dementia, according to a recent U.S. study published in the the journal Neurology.” Hmmm. Well, of course. We knew that, he chuffed to himself. Coming from a family of avid readers who lived ……… click below for more ↓

The CAO Conspiracies

Collingwood / Conspiracy Theories / Humour & Satire / Municipal PoliticsOne Comment

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Collingwood has appointed an interim CAO, John Brown, former city manager of Brantford, St. John’s and Oshawa, to help the town’s administration and governance during the interim while we search for a full-time CAO. This will, of course, send the bloggers into a frothing tizzy of frenetic accusations and conspiracy theories. So to save them the effort of having to explain this, I have written some plausible conspiracy theories for them to consider for their own use: 1. It’s actually Paul Bonwick, cleverly disguised by cosmetic surgery to look shorter, older and bald. Paul was last seen boarding a plane to the ……… click below for more ↓

The Decline in Media Credibility and Profitability

Critical Thinking / Culture / Internet & Social Media / Media Issues / My Writing / Social Order & Disorder6 Comments

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Last August the Pew research Center released the results of its latest study on how much the American public trusts the media. This has been part of an ongoing study since at least 2002, and ever since the first report, the amount of trust in media has fallen. This has been a hot topic of discussion online ever since, and the source of much hand-wringing at each new release. Perhaps the mounting number of scandals in journalism has soured an audience accustomed to believing the media is honorable, trustworthy and upright. Perhaps it’s the growing politicization of (some) media that ……… click below for more ↓

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

Critical Thinking / Culture / Personal Reminiscences / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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I was thinking of the lines from that Fairport Convention song this week as we walked through Toronto on our three-day mini-holiday. I can still hear Sandy Denny’s wonderful, haunting voice singing the chorus of that dreamy, sad song, as vibrantly as the day I first played the album, back in the late 1960s: For who knows where the time goes? Who knows where the time goes? That song has stuck with me all these years, an anthem of the era, but strangely prescient. Who would have thought it would resonate in an entirely different way, 45 years later? Denny ……… click below for more ↓

The Game of the Book of Thrones

Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Humour & Satire / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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No, it’s not about that heavyweight book series by George Martin, or the TV series based on it (or even about how you really need to read the books to understand anything that is happening in the TV series). It’s about the other throne, the porcelain one. And what books are best for reading thereon. Yes, reading on the toilet. Don’t tell me you just sit there and stare vacantly into space. This is important time. Those few rare minutes when we really have uninterrupted time to ourselves; quality time with our bodily functions unhampered by TV, by the phone, ……… click below for more ↓

A Little Uke on the Side

Arts / Musical Instruments / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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About 20 kilometres from home, while mentally playing the piece I had practiced all week, I asked myself if I had remembered to pack my tuner. I remembered taking it off the ukulele and placing it in my luggage. I had raced upstairs to put it away and grab a gig bag for the Boat Paddle uke, resting on its stand downstairs. Whew. Of course the tuner was safely stored in the luggage. And the uke was… my mental alarm sounded. Still sitting in its stand. Back home. I had been distracted, gathering my books for the trip, forgot about ……… click below for more ↓

Notes for a Spring Evening

Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Personal Reminiscences / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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Late spring, Saturday night, sitting here surrounded by the trees and garden in full bloom, everything lush and full of life, my view from the front porch of verdant trees and garden, everything so very green. Peaceful. Relaxing. Would that this evening could go on forever. Glass of Sledgehammer Zinfandel to round off the evening, a couple of books to read on the table beside me, the dog and two cats outside with us. Doesn’t get much better than this. Well maybe if we had opened a bottle of Cardinal Zin… which we both think is a better wine. But ……… click below for more ↓

When did I become my parents?

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I was driving down to Toronto, Saturday, listening to a CD with Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and several other singers of my parents’ generation, singing along, and I wondered aloud, “When did I become my parents?” When did I start buying and playing their music? When did I start choosing an Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong CD for a road trip instead of Bruce Springsteen or Blue Cheer? When did I get so old? Who’s the old guy staring back at me from the mirror? In the 1950s and 60s, when I was growing up, I would not ……… click below for more ↓

Midway in our Life’s Journey…

Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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So begins The Inferno, the first of the three books that comprise Dante’s magnificent and complex work, The Divine Comedy.* It’s a rich, complex and challenging read. I have to admit I have not read it all – all three books that is – but I have made a mighty effort to complete Inferno in several editions. My problem is not comprehension, but rather distraction. Were this a desert isle, it would make it much easier to finish. I read like a jackdaw. But back to Dante. The first lines (Canto I, trans. by John Ciardi, Norton edn.), continue: Midway in ……… click below for more ↓

Musing on Melville’s Poetry

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I came across a poem last night that I had not read in the past (always a pleasant thing to discover something new in one of your books)*. It is by Herman Melville, an author I associate with novels and short stories rather than poetry. Yet he was surprisingly prolific as a poet, mostly in his later life. Poem Hunter lists 93 of his poems on its site (on PDF here). He wrote many more, it seems – many of them naval or related to the sea, others about the Civil War – and the collected works can be found ……… click below for more ↓

Appreciating B-Movies

Arts / Culture / Film & Reviews / Music & Reviews / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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It drives Susan to distraction that I love B-flicks. She squirms and fidgets if I put one into the DVD player and can seldom sit through an entire movie. They get cut off mid-film, and saved for me some time in the vague future when I might have an evening alone to finish watching it and the others in the category. Overacted, melodramatic, clumsily scripted, wooden dialogue, transparent effects, low budgets… what’s not to like? Okay, not all of them, but some fit that description. The range in B-flicks is great: from the truly abysmal to brilliancy (albeit usually unrecognized, ……… click below for more ↓

Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship

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I was 8, maybe 9 years old, when my parents gave me a hardcover copy of Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship by Victor Appleton II. Probably a birthday or Xmas present. I can’t recall which. I just recall how excited I was when I read this book – my earliest experience of science fiction. I soon had a couple of dozen of the Tom Swift books in my collection. My memory of Tom Swift (Jr) and that book came back today when I wandered into a garage sale on Cedar Street and found a copy of the same original ……… click below for more ↓

Shakespeare’s Lost Plays

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Shakespeare’s canon, as it is known today, is incomplete. The Bard is known to have written several plays that were not, for various reasons, included in the First Folio printed shortly after his death. Other plays, several included in the third folio, were attributed to Shakespeare after that publication, but most are known not to have been written by him, and have since been rejected (called the Shakespeare Apocrypha). Some, like Pericles, have be given grudging acceptance in the modern canon. Many modern scholars accept Pericles as a collaboration between Shakespeare and a lesser talent (George Wilkins is suggested), but ……… click below for more ↓

The Pulp Renaissance

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In the late 1950s, I came across a copy (1912; an original edition, I believe) of Edgar Rice Burrough’s first published novel, Tarzan, The Ape Man, on my parent’s bookshelf in the basement. A forgotten book, one my father had likely brought with him from England when he immigrated here in 1947, something from his own boyhood. It sat beside old volumes of the Boy’s Own Annual and other English books. Of course I had to open it and read it. From the very start, I was fascinated by it, by the adventure, by the sheer fantasy of it all. ……… click below for more ↓

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