Glenn Kubish

  It’s all a gift, worth trying to notice algorithm free. Three Things this week: 1. Reliable sources 📰 The Lektriever, of all things, somehow surfaced in back-and-forth with Hogey as we pedalled last week. The Lektriever, how to describe it? It was a kind of giant mechanized memory machine, a chairlift of files holding news clippings organized by topic and author. The contraption was in the library at the back of the Sun newsroom in the 50th Street building when I worked there as a young reporter. You’d get your assignment from the desk, you’d go back to see John or Bruce or Ileiren in the library and get your files, so that,  before doing any interviews, you had a handle on what had previously been reported on the story. The librarians would get the old Lektriever chugging, and hit stop when the tray with your files came to the front. Very analog. Kinda like how my memory works some days. Which is what Hogey and I were talking about...getting older….forgetting stuff….ca...

The Three Things podcast is an attempt at this time every week to stop, take a breath and make note of what I noticed that I noticed, with no help from the algorithm, no code from politicians, no prompt from the advertisers.  And then say it out loud. Here's Three Things podcast, episode 38:  Here are the three things:  1. A disappearing act A couple of blocks from home is my favorite no-name park. It’s not big enough to have a name. There’s no list of donors, no lines of verse inscribed anywhere. There’s no plaque. But somebody with the knowledge and command of autumn colours was behind that park. This is the time of year that that unknown planner or planter should receive a bouquet of thanks. Now, the little park is not a postcard view of Edmonton, and I’ve yet to see fine arts students there painting it, but, still, it is a kind of magic. It’s a slow-moving magic act, as the green leaf trees we’ve had our eyes on for a couple of months, and gotten used to, are transfor...

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...

That was as close to a sublime rainbow as I have ever witnessed. I almost missed it. I was pedalling east down the MacKinnon Ravine. I had just said hello to the stand of spruce trees I greet going by.  It's curious to hear your own voice talking to trees. I have done this for years. After the trees, the trail curves to the right and then swoops to the left and, ahead, a woman stood off to the side of the trail. She was pointing to the sky behind me. I stopped. A rain drop hit the top of my hand. "Look," she said. "Look" does not give a person much of a clue about what is about to be seen. I turned around. I saw a ribbon of lights arced across the western sky. And before I had the instant needed to apply to it the concept of rainbow, I saw it as a colossal faucet turned on full bore, emptying a torrent of coloured water into the sink of the North Saskatchewan River. In another instant, it stopped being a spout of light, and became, again, properl...

I stop for cranes. In my defence, so does Knausgaard: There were few things I found more beautiful than cranes, the skeletal nature of their construction, the steel wires running along the top and bottom of the protruding arm, the enormous hook, the way heavy objects dangled when being slowly transported through the air, the sky that formed a backdrop to this mechanical provisorium. And, with apologies, so did Sibelius in the Kuolema andante. Cranes with cement payloads stop me on the Oliverbahn. They stop me because skyships are worth stopping for. On Monday, the crane atop the Stantec Tower starts to come down. Necks will crane up. While contemplating things above, these words, to the tune of The Lord's Prayer, came to mind. Sure, it creaks. It is a tribute to those who build. Tower farther That art in heaven Yellow'd be thy crane Thou hauled up tonnes Now will be undone And brought to earth sometime around March 11th. Gift us t...

I pushed open the door of the University LRT station this morning and felt the short surge of electricity that prepares me for a bodily encounter with a stranger who is going to ask for money. "Hi, buddy, do you have a bus transfer?" the man asked. He seemed friendly. Bus transfer, I said to myself. "No, sorry, I don't have a transfer," I said quickly, eyes down. That wasn't exactly true. I was on my way to campus to find a place to read or write or try to read or write while checking social media. The truth is I had no real place to go this morning, and I realized that slightly disturbing fact reading Knausgaard on the train across the river from downtown. I have gotten to Book 5. Our teenaged hero  is back in Kristiansand after a minor hitchhiking odyssey from Norway to Greece. I ended up at the library. It was habit that drove me there, some of the same sensation of panic I'd had when I walked around there during my years at gymnas  ...

So, I collect sentences. Here are three more that keep gifting insight. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.  - Wendell Berry, What Are People For? Berry's book I read this years ago, and go back to it whenever I hear outside or start to feel inside the logic that says, you are doomed to fail, so, don't. Don't speak. Don't act. Don't protest. Don't fail. Don't resist. Don't try. This, says Berry, is the voice that destroys a sense of nobility. It makes doing the result of the cold calculus of winning. Why vote? My candidate won't win. Why argue? My argument won't win the day. Why speak up? My voice will be swamped. Berry asks us to contemplate that the answer, like the question, is radically individualistic. The sentence is alive. The interjection I think quietly ...

One of the only things I was ever half good at was listening to intelligent people talk to each other. Tory Building, University of Alberta I was formed in this eavesdropping skill during my undergraduate years at the University of Alberta, where it was impressed on me, okay, hammered into me, that before I could arrive at my own opinions on the eternal questions, it was proper to develop a deep respect for the opinions of those with a right to their opinions.  And, so, it was more enlightening to try to compare what Nietzsche thought about justice to what Rousseau thought about justice, and both to what Plato's Socrates thought about justice, than it was to get worked up by what the Edmonton Sun editorial board thought about justice. Of course, there was some hermeneutics fictionalizing going on; indeed, how could you ever prove that a conversation across time would have been the conversation in time? But, the reflex has served me and has stayed with me. And, perhaps,...