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 and happy Folk Fest is back (more about that next week), friends. Here are three little things from my life that I noticed I noticed made me feel happy or thankful. Three Things, episode 81:                                  1. Flowers   There are days, like last Monday, when my angle on things is obtuse enough to let me make believe that I am underwater, that all of this is underwater, that the sky, as I ride my bike, isn’t as much the sky as the top skin of the ocean stared up at from its asphalt floor. The illusion is enhanced by the flow of automobile traffic that carries along the leviathans of the road, the delivery trucks. Pickups emit inky exhaust. Motorcycles dart in and out of their lanes, rapidly. Boulevard trees sway like seagrass.  Sea anemone, downtown Edmonton At the front of a yard in Glenora, a bee floats through the thin stems and the tiny bell-shaped flo...

That is my old Miyata Six Ten leaning against the trash can. This is my fave piece of sidewalk. Behind the white chair I’m sitting on is Transcend Coffee, and behind and below Transcend Coffee is Pharos Pizza. Great Popeye there.  Pharos sat on the corner of 109 St and 87 Ave, and it was west along 87 Ave that we would take Sunday drives with my grandfather in his 1965 Ford Custom. When motoring mattered. He would take us through the University of Alberta campus. Years later, I got glimpses of Athens and Jerusalem there. I saw Shelagh in Dewey’s there.  South down 109 St was Miami Pizza. We’d take food back to J + M’s place and listen to Neil Young.  Across 109 St sits the building that housed the restaurant I had breakfast in the morning Shelagh and I got married. I think. I can’t remember what it was called. Thirty years ago this summer.  To the left of the restaurant building and back 45 years or so was the Kinsmen golf course on the o...

The University of Alberta President, David Turpin, stood on stage at convocation ceremonies and asked the graduates seated before him to look back. "Your parents, your siblings, your grandparents, your spouses, your children, your friends, let's turn around and say thank you," Turpin said. Under Turpin's baton, a couple hundred gowned students rose in a wave from their floor seats in the Jubilee Auditorium, their mortarboards bobbing, their academic hoods, red for Law, white for Arts, shining. They cheered and clapped and received back hoots and hollers and hellos from the balconies. It was something to behold from our seats in row C of the first balcony. It is something again to behold from the stage. For a couple of years I sat on Alumni Council. Among the thanks for the early morning meetings on campus was the chance to represent alumni on stage during convocation.  It wasn't much of a chance, actually. It was a privilege to sit gowned up with th...

This picture captured me this morning. The elements came together. Rainbow, shining birds, stormy and clear sky, light, dark, river, bicycle, the University of Alberta, a man with orange hat, arms crossed, standing in witness. In the bottom right corner a kind of shadow signature. I thought: How lovely it is to know how to ride a bicycle so that you can easily stop riding a bicycle and stand and watch a rainbow when your heart tells you to stop and watch a rainbow. I took the picture and then took a chance. "Hello," I said to the man with the orange hat.  He took an earbud out of his right ear.  "Hi. I took a pic and you might like it and if you do, here, take my phone and email it to yourself." He looked at the picture and smiled and said wow or that's cool and he took the offered device and entered his email address. While this was was happening, my friend Maryanne recorded the scene of two men, two rainbows, one phone. The man in the orange...

I am putting this in the blog so I don't forget the question I texted to eldest son Alexander tonight. And the answer I got back about 20 minutes later.  I asked Alex about margin because I am working on a presentation that hinges on a creative handling of the word marginalization. On my own, I had made an etymological connection between "margin" and "margarine," but Alex advised that was "flimsy" and, moreover, "false." Why I thought I could venture out all on my own when we have a son trained in classics at the University of Alberta is beyond me. Actually, it's pretty much all beyond me. A classics degree is not the most obvious path to take in a technocratic, careerist world, but our technocratic, careerist world needs classics kids. We need their perspective, their long view, their commitment to learning and accuracy and the concepts the gird public life. Gratias tibi agimus, Alex. With Alex, in classi...

One of the only things I was ever half good at was listening to intelligent people talk to each other. Tory Building, University of Alberta I was formed in this eavesdropping skill during my undergraduate years at the University of Alberta, where it was impressed on me, okay, hammered into me, that before I could arrive at my own opinions on the eternal questions, it was proper to develop a deep respect for the opinions of those with a right to their opinions.  And, so, it was more enlightening to try to compare what Nietzsche thought about justice to what Rousseau thought about justice, and both to what Plato's Socrates thought about justice, than it was to get worked up by what the Edmonton Sun editorial board thought about justice. Of course, there was some hermeneutics fictionalizing going on; indeed, how could you ever prove that a conversation across time would have been the conversation in time? But, the reflex has served me and has stayed with me. And, perhaps,...

Sometimes it's fun to introduce people to each other just to watch the conversation flow. And, so, Ted Bishop, professor of English at the University of Alberta and social historian of ink, Bishop in Avenue Magazine I'd like to introduce you to Brian Fallon, tattooed lead singer of The Gaslight Anthem, whose latest album Handwritten remains, thanks to our youngest son, on heavy rotation in our house and car. Fallon I don't know Bishop very well, but he did teach me English 309: Expository Writing when I was an undergrad those many years ago. And he made an indelible impression. And I don't know Fallon at all, but he's made his mark on Mikey's imagination and guitar playing. I think ink is at the top of the page of the things you two could talk about. I'd just like to listen in. Handwritten is awash in ink, or, what that ink in many songs symbolizes: the vitality of human blood. This is from the album's namesake song: I'm in love ...

I wonder about the quiet people at political protests. Door pounders The ones who know enough to come with saucepans and drumsticks, the ones who know the words to the chants, the ones who are willing to bang on doors and put video cameras in the faces of security officers and the ones who wear red patches on their coats, all these are interesting folks, don't get me wrong. But as much as I am intrigued by their tactics, and curious about their stories, I find the quiet people, the ones who stand next to walls at the edges of the protests, just a little more interesting. Maybe I know them a little better. Among the protesters at this afternoon's rally against post-secondary budget cuts in Alberta was one of those quiet ones. If you saw him, you'd be right to conclude it had been a few years since he was at an event like this. And that he felt a little uncomfortable, a little out of his element. Postered chanters Had he been asked by one of the many news re...