February 2016

The question: “Why do so many women have so many problems with sleep?” is an important question for me because I am a bad sleeper who was not always a bad sleeper, who was once a great sleeper.

My first teaching job carried me straight from the RAF and England to St. John’s, Newfoundland, when I was but 27. I still find my first impressions to be the overpowering ones: of fog or knocking sea.

The established tale of mid-century abstract painting in this country relies on two parallel narratives, each originating from either side of Canada’s two solitudes. In Montreal, it was the story of the Automatistes, of Borduas and Riopelle, Barbeau and Françoise Sullivan.

Marc Ellis has written over two dozen texts on the themes of justice, reconciliation, peace and conflict in Latin America and the Middle East. He is best known for his work on the links between the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

Treatment had been a darkly magical experience, marked not just with appointments and scans and hospitalizations, but also with love that boiled over, drowning out the pain and unease. In its place, the eerie quiet of my remission haunted me.

Paris, Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Nuit Blanche : Nathan Coley, 2006. Photograph by Vincent Desjardins From Dublin Review of Books: Sante’s chapter on insurgents across the centuries is detailed and evocative but ties itself, however colourfully, to a history of facts and dates and salient events. By chapter 11 even the...

The story of Phyllis on Aristotle dates back to the 13th century in German and French versions, but is much better known from John Herold’s Latin version from the 14th century.

Our brains are lazy; we are reluctant to remember things when we can in effect delegate the task to someone or something else. You can observe this by listening to couples, who often consult one another’s memories: “What was the name of that nice Chinese restaurant we went to...

by Helen Blejerman Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews, Edited by Sarah Lightman, McFarland, 316 pp. Sarah Lightman uses the word confession in her title, but it is clear that these women artists were not looking for repentance or absolution. The word is used to mean...

Andrzej Żuławski died on February 17 in Warsaw, Poland, less than 300-miles away from where he was born, in Lviv, in 1940.

The only known image of the dramatist, poet, pamphleteer, and initially unrepentant libertine Robert Greene is a woodcut from John Dickenson’s Greene in Conceipt, printed in 1598, five years after its subject had died an early death at the age of thirty-four.

Today I ran without music. When I run this way my head boils out, matter shooting everywhere like water on hot oil. Phrases reach me and mostly move away before I can trap and extend them into actual thoughts.

Reading Bök’s many DNA poems, we realize that all our bodies are made from highly restricted vocabularies. Bök wrote in the time of the first generation to witness the great bee die-off, when the chemical genius of bees was undone by other chemical geniuses who decided to spread insecticidal...

Taking from the rich to give to the poor has been, is and should be the way forward for an exploited majority against remote, unaccountable concentrations of extreme wealth and power.

The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t.

I met this really beautiful woman at an artist colony and we had a terrific affair and if you don’t know it colonies are good for work or no work and this was a no work summer.

For some women, menopause is no big deal. Some say they barely notice it. My mother, long ago, described her menopause this way: “My periods just started gettin’ lighter and lighter, and my harmones settled down, and then one day … pfft! It was over.”

I’m in India. Or at least that’s what my perceptual experience, consciousness, and mind are telling me. It’s hard to know for sure. The reason I have doubts surrounds the immateriality of my being here, and moreover, the immateriality of India itself.