Lemurian Congress

Every weekday we'd drive to the parking lot of the obscure company and stand on the pvement, eating take-out breakfasts and making awkwa...

I love the qualification in the Mark Hellinger endorsement: one of the best novels IN ITS CLASS. Just so we're not confusing it with Do...

As best as I can glean from the pages of The New Yorker, 1930 was the year of: Backgammon. All the department stores were selling deluxe set...

For a few weeks this summer my workplace has had to deal with a street person's leftovers. This person would sleep overnight in one of o...

Throughout 1928 The New Yorker ran a sporadic "song lyrics we'd like to hear" section, most of them satirizing the over-sentim...

Sometimes I pick up a book in order to fill a gap in my reading habits. Recently I have been buying and reading random books by female autho...

In his rather informal book "American Vaudeville," author Douglas Gilbert often goes off on wild tangents, describing the long-los...

In honour of the gold rush demimondes that I'm reading so much about, here's a song they were known to sing in the far-north dance h...

A few weeks ago I (poorly) digitized a couple of rare Canadian music videos, and then put them on YouTube. Strangely, the one that generated...

One of my many self-improvement resolutions is to stop being concerned about what other people do, but let me just say this: I hate people w...

Ever since I've started walking (instead of driving), I have come to appreciate trees. I used to climb them as a child but I don't r...

No, it's not a story about a cuddly rodent, it's another excerpt from The New Yorker's series about "underworld slang....

On March 24, 1928, the New Yorker has begun publishing a series of articles written in "underworld slang," supposedly written by a...

I try not to write music reviews because I'm tempted to use words like "fabulous" or "wonderful," which don't co...

In my final year of University I took three courses that literally changed the way I look at the world. They were all taught by Robert C. Pr...

Despite my complaints about the gender/class sledgehammer that Carolyn Strange weilds in "Toronto's Girl Problem," I AM enjoyi...