Glenn Kubish

It feels difficult and wrong and even obscene to fiddle around with three little things when such big things are going wrong, and when ordinary people are forced onto the unarmed road of flight. But I am grateful for my little life. I hope it can stay this way. It is heartbreaking to see everyday lives clawed apart by the powerful. Against the historic backdrop of our dark times, I offer this week's Three Things подкаст . 1. Reappearing act   The doorbell rang. Our friends Lori and Murray were on the front step, carrying a gift from the beyond. Back in the 2000-2001 minor hockey season Murray coached the KC Annunciation Rink Rats novice team on which our son Alex played. Coach Murray had things under control, including the most important thing for a coach to have under control: himself. He was calm and knowledgeable and made the season fun for the eight- and nine-year-olds and their fans. He was in it for the team. (The mistakes I would go on to make as a hockey coach I wouldn’t h...

As I remember, the machine was called the Lektriever. The device was from another age of recall. It was a giant electronic carousel of a contraption that contained terraces of newspaper clippings organized in files according to the reporter's name and subject matter. Under the eye of the Edmonton Sun librarians, John and Bruce, it would wheeze and kerchunk around until arriving at its destination. Summoning the Lektriever was how you would find, say, a news story by Quig or Roberta Staley or Dean Bennett that you would need as background for the story you were working on that night for the next day's newspaper.  I loved how the archeological Lektriever spun and dug into and served up the past.  The old Lektriever spun back into view yesterday, unexpectedly. Like memories do. I had phoned my mom with a request. Do you remember the old photograph of me when the men landed on the moon? She remembered. I grew up in a family of photograph takers. Everything ...

Here, preserved in the brine of Twitter for as long as the container holds, is a selection of logogram/emoji I worked up this afternoon reading Chapter 6 of The Marvelous Clouds by John Durham Peters and considering writing, the wind, pens, pencils, lipstick, reading, ants, music, the dead, time, sound, birds, atonement, beauty and forgiveness. Thinking about the basics while watching the Raptors-Cavs game and fighting a sore throat and a bit of pain behind the eyes. 😷

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...

I have been thinking a lot lately about repetition.  In his morphology of the joke-tale, Berger assigns repetition the standing of one of the 45 enduring techniques of  humour.  Now there is nothing so unlike humour as a rational explanation of the humorous, but this is what he says:  "The humor of repetition comes from the tension created by some kind of series being established. We wonder whether the series will be able to maintain itself or whether some interesting variation will take place."  " The humor of repetition comes from the tension created by some kind of series being established. We wonder whether the series will be able to maintain itself or whether some interesting variation will take place."  Repetition is on my mind as I continue to try to make sense of the Duckett Cookie Episode. As I read Berger's An Anatomy Of Humor, it's not difficult to find room for Duckett, without the harsher name-calling, to wit: ...