21 February 2013
Step Six: Buying a Car and a Home
If you insist on buying a house, then at least be smart enough to wait until at least 7-10 years after your arrival. Do the math. You need to spend the first three years on your education, one year getting out of debt, and three years earning enough to put aside a big down payment.
8 February 2013
Maybe I will go easier on my sons the next time they can’t find something — but only if it’s something green.
1 February 2013
Living with a superhero makes people careless. Superheroes’ girlfriends tend to have terrible personal safety habits. They always wind up walking down dark, inner city alleys in the middle of the night. Living with The Finder has the same kind of effect on my sons.
1 February 2013
Step Five: Ideology
You have to stop making comparisons between this political system and the one you left behind. The one back home may have been funnier to watch, but don’t forget how ineffective it was. So ineffective, in fact, that you decided to leave the country despite the good laugh you had over the political debates. Politics will be less funny in Canada.
Photo: Martine Doyon
9 December 2012
John Ruskin attached a tower to his bedroom on his mountainside estate, Brantwood, on the shores of Coniston Water in Cumbria. Unlike Sackville-West’s, his tower room windowed on all sides, almost a capsule, offered a corner in which to escape from recurring nightmares or to watch the stars.
6 December 2012
I think of Virginia Woolf’s essay and cabin, Vita Sackville-West’s tower, and Carlyle’s study, their necessary, self-imposed isolation, and wonder how Jane Austen managed to produce six scintillating novels, at least two of which are masterpieces, in the midst of the busy domesticity of a small house where servants and family bumped against each other crossing a threshold.
5 December 2012
Though Carlyle was a literary giant of quasi-mythic proportions and a hero to Victorians, his theories and writing are largely forgotten or ignored outside of university departments of English. That is the fate enjoyed by many a writer, and one need not be dead.
4 December 2012
Step Four: Your Children's Education
Are you wondering how it will be possible to pay your child’s private school tuition fees -- about $5,000 a year – when you are still educating yourself and you have no job?
Photo: Martine Doyon
30 November 2012
There is a greater need than ever for the good smaller publisher. For those of us interested primarily in quality, in good books that speak to their time and place, the importance of the smaller publisher can hardly be overestimated. It is in the smaller companies that the writer-publisher relationship happens. And this, I would suggest, is where good books come from.
29 November 2012
“Random Penguin” will be in a stronger position to negotiate with Amazon, a mega-corporation that's in the business of helping writers self-publish. Which is where these two extremes start to meet.
28 November 2012
It might be that this relationship between writer and publisher is what is most in danger in the digital revolution.
21 November 2012
Salvador Dali's images of The Divine Comedy in Antigua, Guatemala
Canto 13: The Wood of the Suicides:
“Look well, for here one sees things which in words would be incredible.
30 October 2012
Stories will still need to be told, and writers will continue to tell them. It’s not unreasonable to assume that the written word will persist, even if it’s in ways we can scarcely imagine.
25 October 2012
The D&M story should be a wake-up call to Canadians. Canadian literature has thrived nationally and internationally thanks to measures put in place to support Canadian writing and publishing. The measures currently in place, though, were designed for a bygone era. It’s time to revisit those measures, and fast.
Photo: Eléonore Delvaux-Beaudoin
6 October 2012
These Filipinos and Guatamalans and Nigerians live in poverty and in fear and, unlike the immigrants of earlier days, they have little hope, ever, of becoming Canadian citizens. In comparison, the Alis were fortunate, for they could stay here and build a new life for themselves.
3 October 2012
Le Funambule  © Marie-Danielle Croteau, Josée Bisaillon et les éditions Les400 coups, 2010
Works by Stéphane Poulin, Marie-Louise Gay, Stéphane Jorisch, Janice Nadeau, Michael Martchenko, Barbara Reid, Philippe Béha, and others on the block at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
21 September 2012
There have been too many shows of impatience and anger, with each side blaming the other. With few exceptions, this has all been a question of words -- sharp words, throw-away words, unthinking words -- but they have succeeded in hardening attitudes and deepening divisions. Fine words are not all it takes to improve matters, but they can help a great deal in such a language-obsessed city as Montreal.
15 September 2012
Here are ten practical steps for newcomers to Canada who want to get rich. They will guide you from your arrival in this country until the end of your well-heeled life.
Step Three
Friends and Companions
4 September 2012
I once had a conversation with Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse and, I would say, most concepts in interactive computing. He predicted that one day we would have all our experiences delivered to our senses electronically. It sounded unbelievable back then, but it is much more believable now.
30 August 2012
Practical steps for newcomers to Canada who want to get rich. They will guide you from your arrival in this country until the end of your well-heeled life.
Step Two
Schooling
[See Step One: Arrival — Save Your Pennies here]
29 August 2012
The carousel towards the latter end of the Brighton Pier, just before the roller coaster, is grotesquely beautiful, and enthrals the children and older bystanders for that reason. So vividly painted, the horses eerily distorted as they circle and bob, transfixed on a silvery pole to which half-terrified and half-delighted kids hang on and ride. Like all such carousels, this one unapologetically violates principles of aesthetic restraint, nightmarishly stunning as it spins to blaring music above the water.
