Glenn Kubish

Here's this week's Three Things podcast on Apple. Also, in words and pics: 1. Fish 🐠 There’s an aquarium at the Lois Hole Library in west Edmonton, and if you happened to be there last Sunday afternoon close to closing time, that was me standing in front of it, staring like someone who had never seen fish in a tank, which is pretty much what it felt like. I was mesmerized. The little fish twitch and flash and appear quite nonplussed about hanging suspended in gallons of water held in shape by a thin skin of glass on the other side of which is, well, death for them. Earlier that day, Auntie Shelagh and I had spent a couple of hours on Whyte Avenue. We took the steps down to the Tokyo Noodle Shop for ramen. We darted into Blackbyrd for some new vinyl. We drifted over to Sugared & Spiced for brownies and to talk to Jeff about Thomas Hobbes. If you think this dropping, darting and drifting means I now see all of us as kinds of giant upright fish flowing past each other insi...

Joe South said it pretty well then: Oh, the games people play now/Every night and every day now/Never meaning what they say now/Never saying what they mean. Eliot found words for the way words don't want to be found: Words strain/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden/Under the tension, slip, slide, perish/Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/Will not stay still. I listened to South as a boy. My parents had cool LPs. I found Eliot as an undergrad. I love those lines from Burnt Norton. The poet uses perish and decay to talk about words! As if they were alive. And that word still that ends the line, what connection is there to the plea in Ash Wednesday to teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still .?  (Perish. St. Francis Parish. Larry Parrish. Parrish played for the Expos before the parish had perished, and before the Expos had, too. Perish/Parish/Parrish the thought. Anyways.) I was considering these and other things yesterday a...

I am reading Ted Bishop's Ink: Culture, Wonder, And Our Relationship with the Written Word. I am trying not to read it too quickly. I don't think there's a sequel to dive into next. So, I use my computer as a kind of teacher's internet assistant. When Hongwu is mentioned, I check out the emperor's Wikipedia page. When a willow tree in the wind is likened to a writing brush, I head for Google Images to look at a willow tree. But I don't always get where I am going. I get lured this way and that. On the way to the willow I fell into Facebrook. In rough order of encounter, I: saw that my friend Rosa gave a clown face to my Facebook post last night on the changing colours of traffic lights,  looked at Keith's nature photography from the Upper Peninsula,  monitored a debate about the mixture of musicians at Folk Fest workshops,  learned that my friend Michelle went to Ikea on Thursday, a trip immortalized by a Facebook-generated video,  learned my f...

I got up and to the kitchen by 6:26 am this morning. It's now 6:48 am. What have I accomplished so far? Well, I don't know how much I have actually accomplished, but it is interesting to watch what I consume before breakfast. First job was to fire up the laptop and check Gmail, where there was a message from Shelagh, then sitting across the table from me, waiting. It was a link to a short video titled Danny MacAskill vs. San Francisco. Very cool, even if he shouldn't have blown through the intersection when there was a pedestrian in it. But, then again, I don't know who's got the right of way in SFO! Interesting that Remington would sponsor the video. Neat sound off the top. Then, put some tea on. While the kettle was  heating, it was back to the laptop where I learned from a quick Facebook check that Susan Hennig and Corey McDonald liked my post to the CTV Edmonton FB page about a recent Paralympic blog post. Then, a quick check of the blog readers...