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.
Sitting between 150 and 200 pages (depending on the edition) with fourteen essays, Dinner on Monster Island does not overstay its welcome.
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…
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.
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.
Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi was known to be shy, quiet, reclusive, and never quite keeping pace with the revolutionary movements of his time. His interiors are so subdued that they stand out on gallery walls when surrounded by paintings of his contemporaries, most of which are blossoming with colour.
His art, however, didn’t always have a place on these walls.
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