Month: January 2020

I bet a number of people are contemplating today what a world with less work in it would look like. Pour vous:

The suspension of effort can clear a space for long-denied fixations or frustrations—Woolf’s anger, my hunger for success—to reveal themselves. In our stretches of idleness, we are released from external demands to work and to produce. But the appetites that structure our unproductive moments—ambition, lust—impose their own demands. Samuel Johnson, one of the most prolific and ambitious writers of his age, was terrified of his own propensity to idle procrastination and abhorred as a vice “the progress of life retarded by the vis inertiae,” heaping scorn upon those “whose whole labour is to vary the posture of indulgence, and whose day differs from their night, but as a couch or chair differs from a bed.”

Probably all the tail. The world loves us sexy, rugged folk. (Well, with a few notable and reasonable exceptions, especially here at home.) In his own words at CBC.

God, am I ever sick of losing the shine off people I admire to their terrible actions, decisions, and commentary. Worse still, are those who double down on their misguided actions citing some sort of ethical code. I’m looking at you, Peggy. Until this, I had thought GEC a bastion of progressive thinking and acting. According to this article, he is stubbornly choosing the side of a murderer (WHO SERVED ONLY THREE YEARS?!!?!) of an Indigenous woman in Saskatchewan. Please say this isn’t so. Fix it, GEC, and apologize profusely. This isn’t an opportunity for a hypothetical case study in censorship or artistic merit versus authorial history; it’s you grinding a community’s face into the open wound of a hate crime murder that went underpunished, IN THEIR OWN COMMUNITY. Fucking 20C French criticism has death-of-the-author’d us into a generation that thinks personal accountability has no place in literature. I call bullshit.

The University of Regina says it won’t cancel or censor a lecture by renowned Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke simply because he edited poetry written by convicted killer Steven Kummerfield, who beat an Indigenous woman to death in Regina 25 years ago.

The lecture, scheduled for Jan. 23, and a lack of consultation with Indigenous groups in advance of it, has now become so contentious that it has triggered resignations, calls for a boycott and pleas from some faculty and student groups to cancel or postpone the talk.

In 1995, two white, middle-class, young men — Steven Kummerfield and Alex Ternowetsky — lured Pamela George, 28, a single mother who occasionally sold sex to help support her children, outside the city, beat her to death and then bragged about it.

We lost some big names and some close names last year. A few people here I knew well and personally. It’s a hard list to look at, but it’s good to see some of their faces again. We have several origami butterflies made by Wayson in a shadowbox here in the house. Will miss Patrick as well, and I know Teva was a good friend to many of you. And Graeme was a genuinely sweet and generous man.

This is a year end list I can get behind. What words or phrases would you add to the list? Ok Boomer also made the list, but I’m not ready to let that one go yet. (from Inside Higher Ed.)

The most nominated word or phrase for 2020 was quid pro quo.

Several word that made the list were “words that attempt to make something more than it is,” Lake Superior State said. Among those on the list: artisanal, curated and influencer.

Other words or phrases were banished for “pretentiousness or imprecision.” Among them were literally, I mean, living my best life and mouthfeel.