Glenn Kubish

  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...

Let's call the chance occurrence and development of consecutive Twitter posts from discrete tweeters, whether that conjunction is happy and beneficial or not, serentwitterpity . This morning, for instance, @Penalosa_G celebrates open streets, while @TorontoStar reminds us of their fragility: There is serentwitterpity when we reveal what we count: Serentwitterpity happens when points of view about where viewpoints should be pointed clash:  Serentwitterpity often leaves the one who experiences it with a residue of regret. Regret and rue are worth sharing. Share your serentwitterpities with me. I'm  @kub64. :) 

In these late days of the U.S. election campaign, Lev Manovich has been swirling around in my memory. Manovich I met Manovich in print during my time in the University of Alberta's MACT (Master of Arts in Communication and Technology) program. I was intrigued by the way media made a generation ago, in my case, clips of the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street, were brought back to a kind of life. Loveable video and audio of Cookie had been mashed together with infamous video and audio of Stephen Duckett refusing to talk to news reporters, and, voila, I had my research project, courtesy those remix artists.  Manovich, a new media theorist and computer science professor at City University of New York, made a point about the avant-garde aspect of digital media's moment. In the original avant garde movement of the 1920s, artists sought new forms and new ways to represent reality and see what is out there....

Walter Ong teaches that a characteristic of oral thought, as opposed to thought influenced by writing or print, is its reliance on the aggregative over the analytic. Here is the wise Ong: Oral expression...carries a load of epithets and other formulary baggage which high literacy rejects as cumbersome and tirelessly redundant because of its aggregative weight.  It serves the need of memory (there is nowhere but the mind to store expressions in oral cultures) to describe Odysseus as not simply Odysseus, but wily Odysseus, Athena not just as Athena, but grey-eyed Athena,  Nestor as wise Nestor and so on. This is recall before we could look at a script or a book or hit return in a Google search. The oral Trump  Enter Donald Trump and his collection of adjectives that crystallize themselves onto the modified. Lying Ted Cruz Crazy Bernie Sanders Little Marco Rubio 1 for 38 John Kasich Crooked Hillary Clinton Goofy Elizabeth Warren Low Energy Jeb Bush ...

In the latest offering from the occasional New Words feature in this blog, here, under the influence of Donald Trump, are five neologisms about the leading Republican candidate (at this point) in the race for the GOP presidential nomination. Use them or not. For me, it's not a hillary to die on. repubagogue  noun  A GOP presidential candidate and former reality TV star who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices, including fear in its many facets, rather than employing rational argument.  A repubagogue, using old technique, can draw new voices to political realm trumpiquity  noun  The pervasive sense that mediated images of Donald J. Trump are everywhere, or in many places simultaneously.  The trumpiquity of images of New York business mogul  idonic  adjective Happening in the fashion of the ancient literary technique of irony, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a char...

Among the experts, the séance seems settled: communication with the dead is still a perilous, one-way business. That is not to say that our efforts to make contact with the departed and dismembered are not sometimes noble and glorious efforts. It's just to say that it's hard work, all that digging, all that taptaptapping, all that listening. It remains what it always was—difficult to pick out a true signal from the other side. Philosophers know this. Poets know this. Edgar Allan Poe certainly knew this. And now the FBI is again learning this. It's not easy to get at encrypted information. The news: Apple is either or both refusing to help FBI agents trying to crack into Syed Farook's iPhone—Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik killed 14 of Farook's work colleagues at a holiday party on December 2, 2015, in San Bernardino before being killed by police—or saying it is technically impossible, or that it could have been possible had a state official not reset the pa...