In the current issue of The Vocabula Review has a great article Singular They: The Pronoun That Came in from the Cold by Jjoan Ttaber Altieri. Grammar, gender, power, class, language mavens, and the third person singular genderless pronouns. It’s actually worth reading, whatever you think. I found this among many other great articles on the current Arts & Letters Daily.

Don’t write “rap poems”. If that’s what the job requires, for goodness sakes turn it down. (Or, at least do a better bloody job of it.) By the way, I side with many of the commenters: it’s embarrassing, and I think it says something about the monarchy that this is what is offered and accepted.

It’s strange… when I read someone else’s poems, about their life, I always understand the poems that are written at a specific time or from a specific experience or mood or notion to be timeless in a sense, an encapsulation of a moment. But when I look at my own work, it’s somehow different to me. I just found out about the breakup of a couple of friends of mine who were dating; I was looking through some of the archives of my writing and found a poem I wrote for them, and felt somehow uncomfortable with it, as if …

Finally, a literary post, after so many photos and personal updates. I think my computer is working okay. Hm. So I am going to go ahead and talk about what I read while I was doing all those installations and reinstallations and waiting for the formatting jobs to finish. This weekend, in Seoul, I was looking at the “Classics” and wondering which one I should read. I try to pick up one “Classic” novel every once in a while, just to fill out my knowledge of how people used to write. I didn’t get a lot of this kind of …

Jonathan Goldstein was one of the people I met during my first year in Montreal. We never really become close, but then most of the people in our class never became too close to him, as far as I know. But he was always cool.