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October 12, 2016
Norfolk, Murder Mysteries, Birds, and Mimesis
I spent the weekend in Norfolk visiting an old friend. I’ve never been to that part of England before, and because I see the world through a fictional lens, Steve Burrows’ birder mysteries, set in ...
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August 14, 2020Portrait of a Woman Flying
María was seven years old on her first day of work, the morning her father left her in Mexico City at a large house with tall ceilings and walls that were covered in tiles. Whenever she got homesick, ...
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May 25, 2009
Things to Do This Summer in Toronto, for Free
In these difficult times when every penny must count, and money for entertainment, as for everything else, needs to be wisely spent, it’s reassuring to know that there are lots of things to do in Toronto ...
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May 20, 2009
More About Knowing Where We’re Coming from
Funny. In the last post, talking about the need to preserve our cultural creations, I said that we have to know where we’re coming from or we won’t know where we’re going. Today, by accident, I ...
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May 19, 2009Sugar Belly and the Canefields
Sugar Belly pulled all kinds of sounds out of his bamboo sax. Hear the sax wail!
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May 19, 2009Sugar Belly, the Bamboo Saxophone, and Slide Mongoose
Sugar Belly, the Jamaican mento musician who invented the bamboo saxophone, explains how he made it, and plays a Jamaican folk tune, "Slide Mongoose"
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May 19, 2009
Sugar Belly's Bamboo Sax
We were teenagers, older teens.On Saturday morning, we’d go down to Victoria Pier, named after the Queen whose Day we celebrate as I type, so that I just found myself ducking fireworks that seemed dangerously ...
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May 07, 2009
Cool Stuff
Yesterday’s NEW YORK TIMES carried an article in their “Dining” section about Shave Ice, which Florence Fabricant, the author, describes as “popular in Hawaii and Japan as well as other parts ...
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May 04, 2009
It’s About Time
I once told my next door neighbour that I was eighty-seven.It was meant to be a joke.“No…” said she, unbelieving. “You couldn’t be…”“No,” said I. “I’m really not!” And we both ...
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May 03, 2009
Our Town, 2009 Edition
Come the goodweather folks inthis Portuguese-Italian neighbourhoodhang their clothesout to dryso stirring linesof laundryin the breezeare a sure signit’s warming up.Come fill the cupthe poet said…Of ...
