In the eleventh grade I moved to a new town; I didn’t know anyone, but I started at a new high school, and I was still fit enough to cycle around the neighborhood. I decided to cycle in the direction I’d seen a cute girl in my class walk home, as a way of choosing a direction more than in the hopes of running into her. (In the eleventh grade, I wouldn’t have known what to say to her anyway.) [I should note here that my definition of cute girl is idiosyncratic. Rachele Akerman was not every guy’s idea of …
Month: November 2003
The Gate
Have you ever listened to that Belle & Sebastian song, The Gate? If you haven’t, here’s a chance… ] There’s something so sad, and yet also so hopeful about this song. I don’t mean just the lyrics, I mean there is something about the music. As I walked around downtown tonight, lost in my thoughts, reflecting on how amazing it is that I should be walking on this street, here, in a place I never imagined even existed only a few years ago, as I thought of that I listened to this song and you know what I heard? I …
What’s Your Digital IQ?
You can find out here. Mine’s 112. This surprises me.
Scary Love Cartoon
One of the first friends I ever made in Korea sent me this cartoon, instructing me to send it to whichever girl I like best. I decided not to send it to the girl I like best because that girl already knows my feelings, and because, well, this cartoon is really quite scary. Isn’t it? And anyway, she’ll see it here. My friend, mj, told me she emailed it to a fellow she calls “White Face Man”, a (Korean, despite the pale face) man who lives in her city and studies English with her. Here is the little horror of …
Another Man Down…
Hugh Kenner is dead. I remember reading a lot of his The Pound Era when I was studying modernist lit with Andre Furlani at Concordia University. Kenner was probably the most interesting and evocative literary scholar whose work I’d ever studied. It made Pound’s world, and the world of his cohorts, so lucid for me, in a sort of mythic way, anyhow. I don’t know what he’s done of late, and I won’t mourn his death personally, for I know little of him personally. But on his passing it’s only fitting to stop for a moment and think of how …