In a year in which a film about a doll produced by a toy company has grossed $1.4 billion in box-office receipts, it may seem like bad taste to recall the tens of thousands of lives that have been sacrificed to unjust wars in the same period. But it’s that kind of adjacency that Jonathan…

I love how Alice Munro, in her short story “Floating Bridge,” both delays the news her protagonist’s oncologist is about to deliver early in the story and towards the end swerves away from its unexpected content to this: “It removed a certain low-grade freedom. A dull, protective membrane she didn’t even know was there had…

Three months ago, after undergoing an endoscopy, a CT scan, and then a PET-CT, I was told that I was suffering from advanced, metastatic, stage 4-B esophageal cancer. Though my oncologists avoided making predictions, statistics indicated that my chances of surviving for another 1-2 years were grim, making, say, surviving 5 years little more than…

On a recent 5-day trip to Marathon Key, Florida, while waiting for a table at an upscale waterfront restaurant, my wife and I spent about half an hour wandering around the Faro Blanco Resort & Yacht Club gazing with open-mouthed wonder at the obscene size and number of gleaming yachts and super-yachts docked there. It…

Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid. –Ezra Pound, “E.P. Ode Pour L’Election De Son Sepulchre“ (1915) I’ve been meaning to write something about the new German adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, linking it directly to the unquiet atrocities Putin is visiting on Ukraine, which constitute a…

One afternoon, many years ago, while walking around Victoria, BC during a break in a conference, I saw an apartment for rent in a neighborhood I knew nothing about but had a yen to look at, and even to go farther, to rent and disappear forever from wife and sons, extended family, work, profession, colleagues,…

Scrolling through the Criterion Collection for a film to watch while indoor cycling, I came upon Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women as if for the first time. I say “as if” because while the first two episodes in this interrelated 3-part + coda film seemed entirely new to me, I had already seen the third part,…

The recent release of the so-called Best 100 Films of all time by Sight & Sound (bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time), despite the conspicuous absence from the list of brilliant films like Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, Jia Zhangke’s The World, Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,…

When I am not meditating on my own demise, I’ve been attending closely to events that have been ongoing for 10 months to the day, starting with the February 24, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why this has seemed from the start so unthinkably offensive to me likely starts with my long preoccupation with how…