Glenn Kubish

As we wait for the mosquitos' reaction to all the rain of late, here are three things left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude this week. Three Things, episode 127:                          1. Meow!   It’s August 1997. We are at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. From inside a portapotty near the children’s stage, I hear John Prine singing Hello In There. I am in the hot, polyurethane plastic confessional supervising one of our young sons who, I know, will, when we’re done, insist on going not to the stage Prine is at but back to the children’s area. In the battle of Gallagher Hill, it is Fred Penner triumphs.   Dr. Fred Penner was back on stage at the Jubilee Auditorium last week. It was spring convocation at the University of Alberta. The chancellor, Peggy Garritty, had just made him an honorary Doctor of Letters. Penner told the grads about his younger sister, Susie. She was born with Down Syndrome. He rem...

Happy end of the week. It's been a tough week. I try to keep my heart open to little things that make me happy or grateful while that same heart is under cardiovascular bombardment from the outrageous things above. And then say the little things out loud. Here's this week's Three Things podcast . Peggy carrying Saunders on way to vast underground network for goodness. 1. Recommended reading Here's what the great American short story writer George Saunders writes about books and readers in his latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life: Over the last ten years, I've had a chance to give readings and talks all over the world and meet thousands of dedicated readers. Their passion for literature (evident in their questions from the floor, our talks at the signing table, the conversations I've had with book clubs) has convinced me that   there's a vast underground network for goodness at wor...

I have said it before in this blog, but it bears repeating, and that's that sound, according to Ong, "exists only when it is going out of existence." Here is the rest of the quotation from Orality and Literacy : "[Sound} is not simply perishable, but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent. When I pronounce the word 'permanence', by the time I get to the '-pence', [sic] the 'perma'- is gone, and has to be gone.... All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way."  The notion of secondary orality means much more than the strand of thought with which I cling to it. But it makes sense to me that there is something essentially oral, fleeting, evanescent, about the text and pic-based media in which we now move. (I thank my MACT professor, Gordon Gow, and my boss, Peggy Garritty, for pointing me and keeping me in this interesting direction...