Author Archives: jso

Approach­ing Toronto on the last day of Octo­ber. In a new city, every­one you meet partakes of this qual­ity of the denizen, of the holder of a secret: they deport them­selves “natu­rally” with­out appar­ent self-​consciousness, cross­ing streets and walk­ing along side­walks, rather as chil­dren in Quebec are able (mirac­u­lously) to speak French with­out having to think about it.

Twenty-​nine years ago in Fanuj in south­ern Iran, Mehrab Arbab, a high school teacher who today oper­ates the Mr. Tube Steak hot dog stand at the Broad­way SkyTrain sta­tion in Vancou­ver, escaped from the Revo­lu­tion­ary Guard of Ayatol­lah Khome­ini, when they took twenty-​six teach­ers from the school at which Mehrab Arbab taught English, his­tory and geography, […]

I have started a new blog over at blog​ger​.com devoted the ques­tion of what consti­tutes a cultural maga­zine. Many arts and liter­ary publish­ers are strug­gling to adopt or adapt to the stan­dard maga­zine publish­ing models as exhib­ited by enter­tain­ment, news and lifestyle publi­ca­tions that thrive in a world of peri­od­ic­ity and renewal (ie: a consumer […]

Here is terrific summary of a story in Geist, from www​.wordle​.net: (thanks to Lauren Ogston)

Today is my father’s birth­day. We always called it the short­est day of the year: he said it was an easier birth­day to get through than other birth­days. We ignored the fact that it was also the longest night of the year. My father took his own life two years ago, a few months before his […]

—found in my inbox a few days ago

Today is the birth­day of my friend Sherie Kaplan who died earlier this year, so this is the first time that she and I are not exchang­ing emails and phone calls in order to arrange a birth­day dinner. Instead, I have resolved on my own to start this blog again. Sherie and I were born within […]