Poetry & Emotion: Irving Layton’s Banff (c.1978)

‘By walking/ I found out/ Where I was going”–Irving Layton, There Were No Signs. Poetry, like a good notion, always seems to lurk in my shadows. In an attempt to shed my fear of the conforming “(fill in the blank theme) of the Month/Day/Week” , I can’t see a better time to start along a new path than to consider the [...]

“The West” and All That: From Kipling to Morrison

Big words regularly fall short in providing meaningful answers to large questions.  I just finished reading Crazy Like Us:  The Globalization of the American Psyche (Free Press, 2010), Ethan Watters case study expose of the cultural mediums through which various mental illnesses become normalized (in diagnosis)  and standardized (in treatment) across the world.  The book’s main argument is provocative and well-supported.   The book [...]

I’m Here/(You’re Not): Instant Gratification and the FB Travel Post-Trope

Several months ago I was in the archives, researching ways in which “The Great Divide” narrative was presented as a form of national unification, and how such categorizations and reductions of the geophysical world were so central to the “conquering nature” narrative.      The narratives differed, depending on a host of factors including age, gender, culture, and season, but one [...]