History is a funny thing — we think it’s removed from us and somewhere in the past, yeah, but inasmuch as we know about it, it’s in the present, right in front of our eyes. In fact, if it isn’t in the present — some tattered artifact settled into our context and far removed from whatever setting it might have once been in — then it might as well be that proverbial tree falling in a forest with no one aware of the crash. Continue reading ““This is a New Song…””
“What’s Regular For You?”
A few years ago, when our main annual conference was held in Toronto, I walked into a Starbucks downtown, on my way to the convention centre (yes, that’s how Canadians spell it — deal with it). Apart from the curious (though once familiar) experience of all of us standing in a single line and then moving to one of the three open registers each in our turn (instead of my experience here in Tuscaloosa, where it’s each consumer for him/herself once a cashier opens), there was another moment in which the practical conditions of day-to-day life in TO (yeah, that’s what people in the know call it) made evident that a rather different sense of the the subject — of the individual-in-relation-to-the-group — was in operation north of the border.