Glenn Kubish

In the words of Darlingside , you can't live in the past, but the only way to go is to go back.   This week's Three Things goes back to the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. Three Things, episode 135:                            1. Tarps   It’s Saturday morning, we are in a line of festival goers that snakes down the multi-use path on Connors Road next to the dormant LRT tracks. We are waiting for the gates at the top of the hill to open. The wail of bagpipes means it won’t be long. The pipes are leading tarp holders who had been in the pen since whatever o’clock AM to their preferred seating locations at the base of Gallagher Park—where it’s flat, where you’re not fighting a slow but relentless rearguard action against gravity. The rest of us, those who preferred a decent night’s sleep, will scurry to a patch of earth on the slope of the amphitheatre, throw our tarps down and stake our claim when the gates open....

Here, once a week about this time, and because the week's ending is also a kind of beginning, I try to notice what I noticed from my little life that made me happy or grateful and, from the noticing, make the Three Things podcast . 1. Minding the gap 📡 👼 For the most part, I’m good with working remotely. It’s curious, though, how we use the two words “connected” and “remote” to describe distance communication in the pandemic. “Connected” and “remote,” are more opposites than alikes. Connected means “with” and remote means “apart,” kinda, right?  That pair of states of being does capture nicely a piece of the human condition. We are at the same time apart and with. I am indicted every time Auntie Shelagh says something like, okay, did you hear anything that I just said? which is not frequent but frequent enough. The truth about us is probably that we connect because we are remote. We are forced to communicate not just to get our ideas across but because, not being angels, we can...

Almost 2,100 years ago, the Lucretius wrote a book called On the Nature of Things. The scientist-poet muses on the soul, matter, physics, history, happiness, sailing, corn, existential dread, wine, the weather, the theatre, mud, the allure of tyrants in times of ordeal, love, the senses, death, compounds, dreams, fire, fallacy, flatulence, why evil happens to good people, images, the afterlife and other breezy topics of interest to Rome back in the day. And volcanoes. He writes about volcanoes, too. And fabric.  The tract is a song of praise to Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who "was the first that dared to raise mortal eyes" against superstitious religion. It's a slow, timely read.  The book ends unexpectedly during an account of the plague that devastated Greece at the time of the Peloponnesian War. Some scholars suggest Lucretius died before being able to weave together the cosmos into a complete account. I kinda like how it ends. I also like the way The Sopranos ends...

Here is Steinbeck: It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat. These words are sown 50 pages into Travels with Charley in Search of America, the author's account of his drive across the United States in 1960 in his GMC camper truck, Rocinante, and with his poodle, Charley. It remains a thrill to have a good book on the go. And by book I mean a physical, in-your-hand text that can be bent, its pages dog-eared, written on, marked up, lived with. The confident print just stands there, letter upon letter, word after word, unmoving, brought to life by the scanning eye that sees that it is good. We are a family of booked words. Here is the column of Alex's classics books on the dining room table tonight: Okay, we...