January 2012
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I love this observation by Ira Glass on creative work:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the...
September 2011
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Afghanistan’s former president Burhanuddin Rabbani was assassinated yesterday while attempting to negotiate peace with the Taliban — a morally obscure strategy supported to absurd extremes by an America that’s pressed for time.
Terry Glavin’s take on this crooked path in today’s Ottawa Citizen is crystal:
In Washington, London and Brussels, the whole point now is to...
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August 2011
1 post
July 2011
2 posts
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Subtle Degrees
Subtle degrees of domination and servitude are what you know as love.
But love is different it arrives complete - just there - like the moon at the window.
Seek only that of which you have no clue. Desire only that of which you have no hope.
This is not the Oxus River or some little creek. This is the shoreless sea. Here, swimming ends always in drowning.
- Maulana Rumi via Sufi...
May 2011
4 posts
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Last week at choir we sang Wham! At choir. Wham. I...
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Miguel - Girls Like You
So catchy.
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A Philosopher in Love →
A touching piece on David Hume and the greatest love of his life. I like to think that there is great courage in reasoned passion.
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April 2011
3 posts
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“I would join any tribe of which you are a member or we could form a nation of...”
– This compliment has spoiled me forever.
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March 2011
5 posts
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The Pirate Product of Market Failure
Michael Geist talks about the SSRC report on media piracy in the Ottawa Citizen:
Foreign rights holders are often more concerned with preserving high prices in developed countries, rather than actively trying to engage the local population with reasonably priced access. These strategies may maximize profits globally, but they also serve to facilitate pirate markets in many developed...
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Journey Home
The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.
I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveler has to knock...
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MadMixMustang - From the Heart of Glass (Blondie vs. Philip Glass)
Works like magic, doesn’t it? First heard on Gigamesh’s White Light Mix.
February 2011
4 posts
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From an NYT piece on Emirates Airlines:
“Emirates’ strategy is aggressive,” says Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the chief executive of Air France, who complains that Emirates is siphoning off passengers from Europe’s traditional hubs. “Europe is at the center of the global aviation world. It’s the result of aviation history.”
I hope you choke on your hubris, Pierre-Henri. My...
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On Point
George Packer puts Egypt into perspective in the New Yorker:
Ill-informed observers have shed a lot of ink explaining that certain authoritarian regimes stay in power because of the country’s religion, its culture, its people’s passivity or respect for authority or love of pleasure. In fact, the reason is much simpler. The difference between success and failure, between the Philippines and...
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January 2011
7 posts
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Inside a wonderful profile of William Dalrymple in Bookforum, I read something that made my inner Mr. “Everything Comes From India” spring to life:
It was during the writing of White Mughals that Dalrymple discovered something about his own family: His maternal great-great-grandmother Sophia Pattle was the daughter of “a Hindu Bengali woman … who converted to...
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House music all night long.
pardonmyhindi:
Ten...
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December 2010
4 posts
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Taxing Savings →
“It’s ass-backward, I know, but it would work. Give rich people a short term incentive to spend like poor people, then phase it out over time.”
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When you put it that way...
The Caravan has a great excerpt from Syed Ali’s Dubai: Gilded Cage: For the vast majority of second-generation expatriates I interviewed, citizenship is a non-issue. They accept, however grudgingly, their second-class status in Dubai. They live their lives in a place where they are always in a liminal or in-between state, where their existence is defined by a permanent condition of legal...
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We Should Talk About This Problem
There is a Beautiful Creature
Living in a hole you have dug.
So at night
I set fruit and grains
And little pots of wine and milk
Beside your soft earthen mounds,
And I often sing.
But still, my dear,
You do not come out.
I have fallen in love with Someone
Who hides inside you.
We should talk about this problem—-
Otherwise,
I will never leave you alone.
-...
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November 2010
4 posts
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You Will Hear Thunder
You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
That day in Moscow, it will all come true,
when, for the last time, I take my leave,
And hasten to the heights that I have longed for,
Leaving my shadow still to be with you.
- Anna Akhmatova
The grim...
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I couldn’t conjure up the interest to listen...
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October 2010
2 posts
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“If citizenship means compelling new Canadians whose parents hail from China or...”
– John Ibbitson in the Globe and Mail. I have no idea who Louis Riel is, only watch the CBC for The National and the Olympics, and would rather vacation in New Mexico than Nova Scotia, but I’m a well-adjusted immigrante. I credit my assimilation to the NFB and John Candy.
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August 2010
2 posts
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July 2010
2 posts
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June 2010
6 posts
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Billionaire Book Club →
J.P. Morgan Private Bank’s summer reading list for its clients. The lack of fiction is nearly offensive. Silly bankers, storybooks do a brain good.
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Fiction in the Age of E-books
Scott Stossel, Joel Silver, Sarah MacLachlan, Paul Theroux, and Catherine Govier talked books at Luminato.
A wide range of views, especially from the audience. Theroux was totally hogging the spotlight with his dinosaurus ideas and MacLachlan was the only one calling him on it. The next person to say “death of the novel” in my vicinity will receive a really hard pinch —...
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