Category Archives: Uncategorized

Railway Hotels

Posted on February 8, 2009 by Francois Lachance

It is still a prominent part of the skyline of Quebec City: the Chateau Frontenac. It wasn’t always there and am reminded so by this brief aperçu of the view from Northrop Frye’s preface to The Bush Garden: Essays on … Continue reading →

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The Good Death

Posted on February 7, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Rifting on Boswell’s reaction to Hume’s death, Michael Ignatieff writes in The Needs of Strangers [published in 1984] For Hume, spiritual need of Boswell’s sort was a kind of pride, a yearning for certainties beyond the reach of human capacity. … Continue reading →

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Pre-genital Crush

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Mark Merlis in An Arrow’s Flight [published in the U.K. under the title Pyrrhus] has the narrator meditate on a notion of desire that captures the spirit of boyhood that is a country unto itself. Our narrator says Do you … Continue reading →

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Fearlessness and Allied Emotions

Posted on February 5, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Linda Hutcheon concludes her introduction to Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination with a quotation from an article by Jon Slan. He wrote that Frye had “the courage to confront the present without distaste, the past … Continue reading →

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Ravaging Beauty

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Alessandro Baricco in “Another Kind of Beauty: Note on War” the afterword to An Iliad For this reason, today, the task of a true pacifism should be not to demonize war excessively so much as to understand that only when … Continue reading →

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Cixous on Shakespeare

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Francois Lachance

On the worthiness of certain characters for theatre: All of Shakespeare’s characters are like that, every one of them is already his own little theater. Every one of them gets up on his own stage. Every one of Shakespeare’s individuals … Continue reading →

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Ryoko Sekiguchi

Posted on February 1, 2009 by Francois Lachance

This bit from Two Markets, Once Again translated by Sarah Riggs has Sapphic overtones, especially given the emphasized fragments that follow. The texts of our forgotten sisters, deformed in girlish songs, fan out in a flight of diaphanous shadows. Already … Continue reading →

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creating, communicating, collaborating

Posted on January 30, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Donald G. Lenihan with Jay Kaufman. Centre for Collaborative Government. Leveraging our Diversity: Canada as a Learning Society. Changing Government Volume 4. November 2001. Planning and building a learning society thus goes well beyond preparing Canadians for participation in the … Continue reading →

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Understanding Stein

Posted on January 29, 2009 by Francois Lachance

It was published in 1951. Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work by Donald Sutherland ends with a chapter on the “meditations” mode of Stein and it is a section delivered in a Q + A dialogue. Both in style … Continue reading →

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Moral Mnemonic

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Anne McCaffrey in the first volume of the Harper Hall trilogy, Dragonsong, has a lovely set of verses set as an epigraph to chapter 7. Who wills, Can. Who tries, Does. Who loves, Lives. I like how the lines are … Continue reading →

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