Blog
Review: Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience
When you pick up this book, keep your wits about you, you will need them.
Lessons Learned From Life Lived
The plan was to deliver a standard Q&A advice column containing the rest of your Qs. But then my NGL data disappeared along with my access to your dilemmas and those plans to share my As, which wouldn’t have happened if I had someone to warn me.
Review: Momento: On Standing in Front of Art by Jeffery Donaldson
Like with a trip to a museum, it is unlikely that a reader can digest all of Momento’s content in one go, nor is it necessarily ideal to try. However, Donaldson’s work does inspire return visits; on my read-through, my copy ended up full of bookmarks as I moved through the various sections and marked off passages to come back to again.
In Sickness and In Health: Memories from the Time of Hanahaki Disease in Fanfiction
The slow death of Hanahaki disease is meant to be a manifestation of the overwhelm of love, a progression of the colloquial language that we have, for decades, been building to describe this indescribable feeling. Lovesick. Butterflies in your stomach. All of that. It’s not pleasant language. It’s not supposed to be.
Self-mortification: Why I just can’t stop embarrassing myself
Mortification is the defining emotion of my childhood. I don’t mean to say I was unhappy, but I think it’s true that the psychological impact of mortification (by which I mean a kind of lingering, self-inflicted embarrassment) is uniquely acute.
Review: Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario
Sitting between 150 and 200 pages (depending on the edition) with fourteen essays, Dinner on Monster Island does not overstay its welcome.
Let’s please keep romanticizing fall, forever.
There’s something delightful about stereotypically poor weather in the fall. We love that which we spend the rest of the year complaining about: gloomy skies, rainy mornings, brisk nights…
Autumn’s Languish, Languid
I greeted autumn with bitterness this year. Toronto deprived me of it for longer and only provided a mediocre season. The trees were barely colourful, and they struggled to rescue me from all my burdens. In envying my welcoming reception of autumn last year, I’ve begun seeing today’s autumn as a foe.
Lingua Anglica: An English Empire at the End of History
To reiterate my thesis in the plain English of the internet: the advent of the web coincided with what could have been a brief global hegemony of the English language, but its ravenous thirst for content perpetuated the conditions of its spawn.