From Here
We never forget that our lives are novels, here in Montreal, and we never forget what happens on the last page.
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Dormant Last read · last published · next check
Read 11 hours ago and current, but nothing has been published for 3 years.
Latest posts
On Being Yourself
“Being yourself” is rarely the solution and often the problem, especially if you suck. “The future,” Aaron Haspel wagers, “will marvel that we regarded ‘be yourself’ as sound moral advice.”
But Isn’t That, Like, Chinese?: A Selection from John McWhorter’s Woke Racism (2021)
“Here and there, black Americans have purported a certain worry as to just what Chinese people are saying when they say ‘nay-guh,’ but this has always been a kind of joke.”—John McWhorter
The Dark Side of Fake It Till You Make It
“Fake it till you make it” usually means, in practice, “fake it till I believe you”. In other words, become a really good actor. If you can convince me, perhaps you can convince yourself; and if you can’t, well, it’s all the same to me, so long as you put on a good show.
Distant Regard: A Selection from Tony Hoagland’s Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2018)
“If I knew I would be dead by this time next year I believe I would spend the months from now till then writing thank-you notes to strangers and acquaintances, telling them, ‘You really were a great travel agent.’ Or ‘I never got the taste of your kisses out of my mouth.’ Or ‘Watching you walk across the room was part of my destination.’”—Tony Hoagland
The Writer as Sock Puppet: A Selection from Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions (2022)
“There will, of course, be protest movements, and artists and writers will be urged to join them. It will be their moral duty—or so they will be told—to lend their voices to the cause. . . . But it’s tricky telling creative people what to create or demanding that their art serve a high-minded agenda crafted by others. Those among them who follow such hortatory instructions are likely to produce…
Am I a Bad Feminist?: A Selection from Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions (2022)
“I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women, there have to be civil and human rights, period, including the right to fundamental justice, just as for women to have the vote, there has to be a vote. Do Good Feminists believe that only women should have such rights? Surely not. That would be to flip the coin on the old state of affairs in which only men had such…
Love Is Not a Liquid Asset
Love is not a liquid asset, which can be readily spent on strangers; and loving is rarely a zero-sum game.
Montreal: A Love Story
“Montreal remains one of the great cities of the world, and stories of Montreal’s demise are greatly exaggerated.”—Jason Mcdonald
Cosmic Insignificance Therapy: A Selection from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks (2021)
“What you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less. . . . Your own life will have been a minuscule little flicker of near-nothingness in the scheme of things: the merest pinpoint, with two incomprehensibly vast tracts of time, the past and future of the cosmos as a whole, stretching off into…