Glenn Kubish

To the list of cliched consolations built according to a similar sentence pattern—the one good thing about the pandemic is...the only silver lining in the pandemic is...if we've learned one thing from the pandemic, it's that...—I will add mine: the only true comfort in the pandemic has been Edgar Allan Poe.  Poe has been a companion since I dropped the needle on Dylan's latest album and heard the singer in I Contain Multitudes confess that he has "a tell-tale heart like Mr. Poe." I am back to Mr. Poe and reading the short stories and, as strange as it sounds, find in the horror something up to the ordeal we find ourselves in. Yes, I can try to balance out the grimness and the bleakness with good news stories, and I do. But Poe does the trick. The stories are little injections of dread that somehow work to stabilize my fears. Like to like. Literary vaccine.  The Premature Burial tells a story from the point of view of a young man terrified by the prospect of being ...

I can't shake the feeling that whatever play we thought we were in before isn't the play we're in now. The old set has been blown away...we have different lines...about obligation to each other. We're not so familiar with that script.  There's no shortage of lines. There are the basic messages. Distance, wash your hands, wear a mask, avoid social gatherings. There are the lines written by the humorists. Maintain physical distance, or 1 Joey Ramone. There's the threatening voice of authority. If we don't turn this around now, there will be tighter controls ahead. Clever wordplay, too. Spread the word, not the virus. Bend the curve, not the rules. Wearing a mask? Best time to get braces. The big picture: we are in this together, apart. The appeal to the heart: protect your loved ones.  Versions of the last line about protecting loved ones are curious. It's long been thought that protecting loved ones goes without saying. The human impulse to protect loved ...

Almost 2,100 years ago, the Lucretius wrote a book called On the Nature of Things. The scientist-poet muses on the soul, matter, physics, history, happiness, sailing, corn, existential dread, wine, the weather, the theatre, mud, the allure of tyrants in times of ordeal, love, the senses, death, compounds, dreams, fire, fallacy, flatulence, why evil happens to good people, images, the afterlife and other breezy topics of interest to Rome back in the day. And volcanoes. He writes about volcanoes, too. And fabric.  The tract is a song of praise to Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who "was the first that dared to raise mortal eyes" against superstitious religion. It's a slow, timely read.  The book ends unexpectedly during an account of the plague that devastated Greece at the time of the Peloponnesian War. Some scholars suggest Lucretius died before being able to weave together the cosmos into a complete account. I kinda like how it ends. I also like the way The Sopranos ends...

The pieces have been swirling around. On Facebook, my friend Steve had posted a winter-arrives-in-Edmonton pic with the advice to embrace the elements. For the first time, I heard elements. On Twitter. my friend Brett had retweeted the East Village news that Calgary's 9th Avenue cycle track between Macleod Trail and 4th Street was now open. "Your commute in and out of East Village has gotten a little bit sweeter." For the first time, I heard sweeter.  On the sidewalk along the 102 Ave bike lane in Edmonton, a parka'd child sat on the concrete, legs below the knees splayed out in the way we bend before growing inflexible, the bundled one's attention on a mitten full of snow, while, from above, the mother asked the question: "What do you think?" For the first time I heard the question directed at me. What do I, 56-year-old Glenn , think of winter weather? On the pedal home today, the pieces came together in a kind of equation from Grade 7.  CO 2   +  H 2 O...

  Since the current U.S. president called his city a rodent infested mess where human beings wouldn't want to live, Edgar Allan Poe has been having a bit of a moment.  In a song on his latest album, Bob Dylan confesses to having a "tell-tale heart like Mr. Poe and skeletons in the walls of people you know." Saturday Night Live's cold open gives viewers Jim Carrey's Joe Biden reading from Poe's The Raven, corrected and updated for Hillary Clinton's electoral college loss to and Lil Wayne's support for Trump.  Once upon a midnight dreary while Trump retweeted QAnon theories.... But it's Poe's The Masque Of The Red Death that is required reading in this historical moment. Masque as homonym for mask. Red as suggestive of Orange. Death being in and on the air in this pandemic. And that's just the suggestive work of the title. "The 'Red Death' had long devastated the country" is how the short story begins. You don't need a d...

A couple of Toronto Star reporters are doing something cool online. Maybe they've been doing it for awhile. Maybe it's more than just the two of them doing it. Thank you. That's what they're doing. Saying thank you.  A couple of days ago I was following a thread from Brian Bradley that outlined the financial dire straits that restaurants in Toronto's Danforth find themselves in.  At the end of the tweets was this:  Then, today, I caught up on the horrifying story of the automobile violence that had transformed and, now, has erased the life of a woman named Jill Le Clair. From transportation reporter Ben Spurr, this, too, on Twitter:  If the messages of gratitude are coincidental, it's a happy coincidence. If it's a plan, it's a good plan.  For much of my working life I toiled in newsrooms in Edmonton. Sometimes reporters, yes, were very grateful to those who agreed to be interviewed. Just as often, especially at the broadsheet, they expected the thanks t...

This photo arrived from the void the other day.  Shelagh's friends Wendy and John have been going through pics and reclaimed this one from oblivion for us. It shows their two boys and our two boys at the piano. Or, at least, their two boys (who both grew up to be musicians) and one of our two boys at the piano. Michael is the odd boy out in this pic. Characteristically, he makes his feelings known. It's a gift to receive a photo that you never knew existed. What notes is Eamon playing? Look at how B. is looking at his brother's form. Alex is so happy. Michael is so not. And the candles like descending eighth notes. I find myself scouring a new old photo for whatever data it preserves from the burn of time. Their teeth. Their haircuts. Is Mikey holding some kind of stuffed animal? The photo arrives with another insight. We carry each other's beings. Growing older and losing friends to death is devastating. At 56, I am beginning to glimpse that ghastly truth. When friends...

It's the end of October, it's 3 degrees Celsius, it's raining, it's dark, the wind hits my wet face at about 15 km/h. A great night for riding a bicycle in Edmonton.  Let me explain myself.  Which is the point, actually. What I'm searching for is myself. For me, a bicycle has just been the most reliable interrogation device I have ever found. I keep running my questions through it.  I am just back from a 50-minute pedal from the north side. My tan Levi's went from pencil points of rain to splotches to tiny islands of dry fabric. The new asphalt shone oily. The green and red traffic lights projected lightsabers. Car tires sloshed. My nose leaked. I wasn't exactly warm. I felt alive.  Hannah Arendt wasn't talking about riding a bicycle, I get it. But, still:  Vitality and liveliness can be conserved only to the extent that men are willing to take the burden, the toil and trouble of life, upon themselves, Arendt wrote in The Human Condition.  The unexpecte...

Knowing the mountains that were ahead of me, I brought Dylan along that summer in the Rockies. Empire Burlesque was out, with a song that, for me, is still in my top 10 Dylans: Tight Connection To My Heart.  It's a question song. The singer repeatedly and insistently and hopelessly asks a question. The question mark is Dylan's punctuation mark. How does it feel to be on your own? How many roads must a man walk down? But with truth so far off, what good would it do? Can you tell me where we're headin', Lincoln County Road or Armageddon? You can't look at much, can you man? Where are you tonight, Sweet Marie? Can you please crawl out your window? O, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? Wait a minute boys, you know who I am? To that list, the singer in Tight Connection asks: Has anybody seen my love? When Dylan asks a question, I'm in. Tight Connection has more than that vital question, though. It's got great lyrics, echoes of Bogart and Gary Cooper and Hoagy...

Here's Hannah Arendt finding words for my experience of riding a bicycle. Arendt is talking about air travel, but the insight transfers nicely enough:  "[A]ny decrease of terrestrial distance can be won only at the price of putting a decisive distance between man and earth, of alienating man from his immediate earthly surroundings." I tried an Arendtian experiment this afternoon, recording my trip, first on bike, then in car, along our front street and down 91 Avenue toward Andy's IGA. It's a windy day today. The wind brings back Heidegger's insight that wind is always wind-in-the-trees, which, as far as it has been given to me to understand, means that existence is mediated for human beings. We don't get it pure. It's a quick jump from Heidegger to John Prine who knows about the wind, too. For Prine, it's not just the wind, either. Many years later I found myself talking to this girl Who was standing there with her back turned to Lake Marie The w...

Fitz is a fan of the obits, and, so, it was Fitz who pointed out the death notice of the Saskatoon woman named Cathy Watts (née Drabble), September 3, 1948 - September 8, 2020, that was written by the deceased woman herself. If you are reading this, it began, I'm no longer here. Fantastic was a good word for Fitz to use. It captured the eerie sense of being reached from another dimension. For an instant, Cathy Watts's first-person obit felt like an electrically charged communication with someone beyond.  In her auto-bit, Cathy Watts remembered very physical things about her life left behind. The water and rocks of lakes in northern Saskatchewan. The feeling of writing in a notebook. Eating a donut. Quilting. Singing. And other bodily stuff, too. Hugging grandchildren. Swimming nude. Voting. Riding a bicycle.  Riding a bicycle was the joy of joys for Cathy Watts.  "Most of all I was passionately in love with cycling," she wrote. "The very first time I got on a bik...

A few things hit home today. The first four were sculptures by Slavo Cech.  Today was Slavo's #ArtHuntYEG. At 10:00 am, 12 noon, 2:00 pm and 4:00 pm, the artist placed a sculpture in a public place, shared a pic on social media with a written clue and waited while fans tried to figure out where it was.  The first one to get there got the artwork. The first sculpture—they're worth about $500 each, btw—was at the old End of the World lookout down from Saskatchewan Drive. It's now called Keillor Point. Much safer sounding. Still a killer view. Slavo dropped the next one at  ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) River Lot 11∞ Indigenous Art Park. I remember being at the park the day it opened. Speeches were made. A ribbon was cut. It snowed. Umbrellas popped open.  Slavo placed the third on the site of the former Provincial Museum in Glenora.  And the fourth showed up at a statue at the University of Alberta. Putting it mildly, the sculpture winners were overjoyed to take a piece of Slavo hom...

Welcome to #PedalToTheMetal2020! PedalToTheMetal2020 is a lot of things. Above all, it is a community celebration of the art of Slavo Cech.  Slavo is cool. He is a metal sculptor who lives and works and thinks about living and working in Edmonton. That's him in the pic above all tuxed up after presenting the dude in the middle, Prince Edward, with a Slavo Cech bison sculpture during a City Hall ceremony with His Nibs, Mayor Don Iveson. We're lucky Slavo is creating in our midst.  So, the idea behind PedalToTheMetal2020 is to ride our bikes along an 18-km route in west Edmonton and stop at some of Slavo's art in yards along the way. You'll see bears, coyotes, magnificent gates, fences, trellises, bullrushes, lilies and gorgeous abstract shapes. Joe Biden endorses PedalToTheMetal2020, by the way. At each stop, Slavo, astride his trusted mountain bike, will talk about the artwork and take a question or two. You can also share your thoughts and questions with him along the ...