Category archives: General

Despite the book’s grim realism, I liked its insights, the flashes of recognition I experienced when I read the older characters’ dialogue. Like the Midwestern Enid Lambert, my grandmother says “it tickled me” as in “I got a kick out of it”. I’m not sure if Grandma would be tickled by Franzen’s depiction of a […]

This book really cast a spell on me, causing several nights of late-night reading. A story of dislocation, silence, and distance, it resonated with stories I hear from immigrants I work with and with my own experience of living outside of the US for so long.

It’s less than a week since we’re back from Scotland. Heavenly to have fled the hamster-wheel that is the daily subway commute downtown, even for such a short interval.

We took my mother, who is up from Missouri, to see the Andy Warhol exhibit yesterday. I hadn’t known that he did so many disaster pieces. Maybe it was batting silver balloons around at the last exhibition of his work I saw (Chicago 1989) that had falsely given me the impression that he was all […]

My apologies are due to the Toronto Public Library for returning Shalimar The Clown and What I Meant to Say: The Private Lives of Men late. I was reluctant to leave the imagined world of the novel, despite some of the horrors of violence, and I also enjoyed the collection of male musings.

I’m enjoying The Stories of English by David Crystal. When he wrote about Bede, Lindisfarne, and Durham, I got nostalgic for my Medieval Literature class at Durham University. I was 19, full of romantic notions — cobbled lanes and ancient cathedrals made me wild with delight. Our professor took us on a weekend trip to […]

Recently I finished reading Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd. It was mostly pretty heavy going but worth it for the following quote: “Many scholars believe that language evolved to manage social interaction. Social actors can often benefit by communicating about who did what to whom, […]

The other day subway passengers offered a variety of images. One woman carried tall stalks of bamboo. There was an old bearded man in a kufi cap. A young couple huddled together in a side-bench. The girl slept with her head on her boyfriend’s chest. A lock of her hair kept falling forward into her […]

I just finished this novel set in 1930’s Toronto. I enjoyed learning the social history of city streets I’ve seen. Though I don’t know very much about baseball, I cheered on Lucio as he threw the ball that hit the mysterious bird that had stolen Bloomberg the pitcher’s glasses. And when Lucio’s lover Ruthie hits […]

One of my jobs is just a 25 minute walk away. You can go on a back road that features industrial and rural scenery. I try to be alert when I walk by a grassy bank because I’ve seen a lot of groundhogs there. Last week I thought there were no groundhogs about but when […]

Jan Wong’s Red China Blues delivered both entertainment and education. I like her direct sense of humor and honesty. The chapter on Tianamen Sqaure was especially moving. She actually observed the massacre from a Beijing hotel balcony on the north side of the square. I remember that June weekend in 1989 very well because my […]

The Toronto Public Library has had all kinds of holds turn up for me recently, so I’ve been turning lots of pages. I finished Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which was a hit with me. The heroes saved a violin from ideological destruction by saying the name of a tune was “Mozart is Thinking […]

I was leaning on the counter at a nearby Canada Post Office, addressing a package to Missouri, when a man strode up to the two cashiers with a letter. He was shocked at how much it cost to send it express to the States. “I don’t understand why it costs 23 dollars just to send […]

I thought Enron might be on the boring side, but it really had me on the edge of my plush seat, leaning beyond the cup holders. What a medieval morality play! There were villains aplenty and not so many heroes. Is it really that easy to sell image and confidence over substance? Is it really […]

Joel Meyerowitz’s exhibit Aftermath: Images from Ground Zero is in Toronto. We saw it yesterday afternoon. As I studied the wreckage, a heavy numbness pressed on me, but the pictures of firemen and construction workers were comfortingly understandable. The grief in their eyes shows the way to feeling, even though it only hints at the […]

I recently finished Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden Lives of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks. Parts of it seemed overly smug, like when Brooks talked about how gentle and tolerant her home country of Australia is. (Granted, she wrote it before asylum seekers sewed their mouths shut in an Australian detention camp, protesting their […]

Stewart and I saw Bride and Prejudice for the second time last Sunday. Loved it. My favorite part is when the gospel singers serenade the lovers on the beach.

For many years, boxes of my old books and papers have been waiting for me in the garage-studio next to my mom’s house. Since Stewart and I recently drove down to Missouri, the no-room-in-my-suitcase excuse no longer flew. One night during the visit I went through a folder of essays from my freshman composition course […]