Glenn Kubish

Here are three things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness in the maelstrom. Three Things, episode 111:                               1. Socks   I was reading Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech from, wow, what is already, could it really be, six years ago now? Near the end, he takes us to the underworld, calling up the specter of the wandering Odysseus, who has made a never-ending tour stop in Hades to meet the Greek hero Achilles.  Dylan reminds us that Achilles said if he could, he would choose to go back   “...and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is,   king in the land of the dead, hat whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.” I heard the echo of Maya Angelou’s grandmother. She warns her granddaughter about complaining like the customers, Sister Murphy and Brother Thomps...

  Happy end of the week, y’al! I collect sentences. There, I admitted it. Here are three really good ones that came into or back into my life this week as reading summer rolls on. Three Things, episode 83:                            1. Dylan   Here’s the line:   Something there is about you that strikes a match in me. It’s the opening line from "Something There Is About You," which is song #5 on Side 1 of Dylan’s Planet Waves album. (Parenthetically, it’s the album that features as the last song on Side 1 and the first song on Side 2 the same song, "Forever Young," as if to make clear to the listener back in 1974 that Dylan would himself stay young by re-birthing different versions of his songs.) (Again, parenthetically, the same song with the line that I’ll get right back to contains a lovely, autobiographical reference to the rainy days a young Robert Zimmerman spent tramping around the hills of old ...

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 ...

Many Edmontonians complain about the meanness of our city, because we are convinced that we are born for a brief span of summer, and because that spell of the fair season that has been given to us rushes by so swiftly and rapidly that with very few exceptions it ceases for many of us just when we are getting ready for it. Seneca Okay, yes, that's more Seneca from  On The Shortness of Life re-keyed for life in Edmonton around this time of year than it is me, but when (your imagination is) in Rome, blog as the Romans do. Seneca is good to read at this time of year. Actually, Seneca should be required reading at this time of year, this dripping time of year. September in Edmonton drips leaves and it drips regret. In small talk we drip things like: "Do you remember how it used to stay light until 11 and now it's so dark now? Kinda depressing." And: "It is so cold in the morning these days. I mean, it was two degrees when I got up! Brutal." And...