Category Archives: Uncategorized

Adam Mars-Jones’s “Cinematically Challenged” collected in Blind Bitter Happiness is particularly caustic about the Penny Marshall film based on the book by Oliver Sacks, Awakenings. With steady tongs one can lift this bit out without danger to the overly sensitive … Continue reading →

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi translated by Raymond Rosenthal has a marvellous tricolon. Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that … Continue reading →

Michael Ondaatje Handwriting “Death at Kataragama” evokes for me the sculptural qualities of rice paddies: The way someone’s name holds terraces of character […] The containment of name is here poised on the verge of overflowing into the adventures of … Continue reading →

Harvey Schachter “On time, and time management” reviews for Canadian Government Executive (April 2006) some books. A key sentence from the review: The ancient Greeks recognized a difference between chronos, the form of time we measure through clocks, and kairos, … Continue reading →

“Talking Tea” is a Jim Thomas poem, found among other places in Ukula Volume 3 Number 1. It is a poem whose addressee is an at times intimate: I love it when you talk tea. I love your lips upon … Continue reading →

From the introduction by Charles Taylor to the Tapir Press bilingual edition of Ernest Renan’s Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? What is a Nation? Precisely because it is so inextricably linked to the idea of the sovereignty of a people, the idea … Continue reading →

In Confucius — The Secular as Sacred Herbet Fingarette paints Confucious, Jesus and Gautama Buddha as men who have “genuinely and profoudly and self-consciously reanimated their traditions” and there is a hint, for me, of Martin Buber in the affirmation … Continue reading →